China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Ramon H. Myers, Stanford University
Discussant: Douglass North, Washington University, St. Louis
China’s eighteenth-century social and economic development constituted a unique turning point in Chinese history that had unusual consequences for Chinese society during the next two centuries. By 1800, new systemic relations between the political center and society had enabled the population to more than double, so that China achieved population density levels that matched the highest density levels of the most advanced parts of Western Europe. Moreover, China’s population had grown at an unusual rate, perhaps comparable to that of the top ten European nations when they experienced their demographic revolution between 1850 and 1960. China’s market economy also had achieved a degree of domestic and international market integration that was unprecedented in previous millennia. Yet China’s forces of production remained backward compared to those of Europe.
Chinese households and state policies had interacted to produce new fertility and mortality patterns of change to generate a population of huge size. The economic market system had evolved as a complex mixture of institutions and organizations linking regions into economic dependency for tens of millions of households still very dependent on agriculture and handicraft. Popular customs and household behavior had developed new means to protect private property rights and to facilitate the evolution of hybrid economic organizations, melding public and private interests, which tended to dominate the economy.
One important legacy of these eighteenth-century developments was that when organizations broke down because the political center and local elites failed to counter external challenges, social and economic recovery was unusually protracted. Another was that China’s different demographic mechanisms and different economic organizations did not promote new forces of production that could make Chinese society converge with the industrialized, urbanized societies like Japan and the West.
R. Bin Wong, University of California, Irvine
Chinese political economy in the 18th and 19th centuries is conventionally viewed in terms of the failures of the Chinese state to promote or at least facilitate the kinds of economic changes that transformed Europe in these same centuries. Certainly when nineteenth-century Chinese policies are viewed with a late twentieth-century understanding of what governmental approaches encourage development, much can be found wanting in Chinese strategies. But what happens when we look at nineteenth-century efforts as elaborations of policies and approaches articulated and implemented in the eighteenth century? The eighteenth century was a period of dramatic population growth, substantial commercial expansion and integration, and effective political and social order. This paper will consider eighteenth and nineteenth-century official policies toward markets, agrarian production, and consumption in order to assess the ways in which the state affected patterns of economic activity typical of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An effort will be made to evaluate government success and failure at managing the economy in terms of the goals and priorities of officials as well as the criteria of growth-inducing factors of concern to modern analysts.
James Z. Lee and Wang Feng, California Institute of Technology
Early modern Western economic theory postulated that population growth can limit economic development and social well-being. Modern technology in recent times has reduced mortality and fertility and increased life expectancy and the decline in childbearing. But the diffusion of such modern technology is also influenced by culture and social relationships, by the adoption of reproductive technology that increases the ability to calculate consciously the costs and benefits of having children. Any decision to curtail reproduction is based on the judgment that such an act is beneficial to the parties involved.
Similarly, the spread of medical technology reflects our new sense of conscious control over the natural world. Such scholars as John Hajnal and Alan Macfarlane have suggested that the European origins of the demographic transition, the European roots of individualism, and even the European development of nineteenth century capitalism are inextricably intertwined and embedded in a European family and demographic culture which encouraged the rise of small families, the increase in literacy, and ultimately the triumph of Western individualism.
On the other hand, non-Western patriarchy, social formation, and economic processes are all subsumed under a universal Other who by their very nature is anti-modern. China is singled out as the personification of the Other—partly as a consequence of its size, partly as a consequence of its better documented history. Malthus, for example, identified China as a society dominated by positive checks and devoid of preventive checks, in contrast to England where the opposite model prevailed. Similarly, Hajnal has proposed that if the Western family system stood at one extreme of the social spectrum, China, together with India, occupied the other.
But China, in spite of its size in the time of Malthus, 300 million, has continued to grow five-fold. In spite of the persistence of culture and institutions, China now has among the lowest fertility and mortality of any large population. This apparent anomaly—unrestrained growth and unexpected decline—challenges the entire corpus of Western social theory from the time of Malthus to today. Our paper elaborates on this challenge by identifying salient aspects of China’s demographic legacy that differ from our previous understanding of demographic processes and offering an alternative demographic model to those identified by the classic economists and later demographers.
Peter C. Perdue, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Arguments connecting the security of individual property rights with economic growth have become prevalent recently, most conspicuously since Douglass North won the Nobel Prize in Economics. But many of these theoretical constructs, whose roots lie in the eighteenth century, rely on an incorrect view that Asian societies like China suffered from an autocratic state that provided no security for individual property and therefore damaged incentives for economic growth. Recent scholarship, based on actual legal cases instead of statutes and cultural prescriptions, demonstrates that Chinese property holders actively defended their rights in courts and often received state support. This paper examines Western political theory’s emphasis on the absence of property rights in the East and discusses the implications for theories of economic growth and institutional change of the recent studies of Chinese property law in social practice.
Ramon H. Myers, Stanford University; Yeh-chien Wang, Academia Sinica
From the late seventeenth century until 1800, China’s economy registered an unprecedented expansion. Agricultural output kept up with population growth, and interregional trade multiplied as never before. In the course of development not only did the private sector demonstrate a high degree of dynamism, but also the public sector played a noticeably constructive role. The Ch’ing state promoted the cultivation of new lands, encouraged the expansion of water control and irrigation works, reformed the system of land taxation, and above all provided a degree of economic and social stability unusual in Chinese history, thus helping to reduce transaction costs and improve private property rights and enabling more households to secure access to the market economy. The state also set up a network of monitoring grain prices and a rather effective program of stabilizing food supply throughout the country. In addition, hybrid organizations for the production and distribution of salt and copper were established that generated additional tax revenue and increased the money supply along with the growth of the economy. Many Ch’ing officials argued for limiting state interference in the marketplace and endorsed the pursuit of making money to increase wealth.
Given an environment of peace and stability and economic infrastructure, millions of people settled in the less populated developing area, producing large amounts of surplus grain and other primary goods for export to the developed area in exchange for industrial goods, capital, and technical know-how. The interflow of capital, goods, and services between the two areas as well as interregional exchange stimulated geographical and industrial specialization and economic development. These developments encouraged in turn greater integration of the domestic market and fostered the growth of new towns and medium-sized cities. China’s economy began to acquire the characteristics of a reticular marketing system of complex, interrelated networks connected by merchants and brokers who helped to coordinate the economic activities of millions of small-scale producers and distributors.
Highly competitive, flexible and adaptive, and virtually always expanding, China’s emerging market economy increasingly depended on labor, while its managers and workers strove to conserve land and related resources. Instead of promoting innovations that would have reduced production and transaction costs, thus expanding the forces of production, the market economy, along with private and public economic organizations, only utilized the existing forces of production in favor of the intensive use of labor and land.