Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic World of the Twentieth Century: Pre-WWI China §§

I have a problem. Any history of the world economy in the twentieth century needs a section on China at the start of the century to balance the section on China at the end. Yet I am not well-qualified to write such a section. And I don't think the section I have is particularly good.

Any suggestions?

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DRAFT: PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE

When in the second half of the nineteenth century the iron-hulled ocean-going steamships began to call at China's ports of Hong Kong, Canton, Tientsin, and Shanghai, China's government and its more than 300 million people of China were in crisis.

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China's Relative Apogee

In the Tang Dynasty years before and the Sung Dynasty years after the year 1000, China had been the most progressive and innovative civilization in the world: innovative technologically, organizationally, and militarily. Its population--60 million? 80 million? 100 million?--was one of the most rapidly growing and best-fed populations in the world, thanks to the development of strains of rice that could be wet-planted, irrigated, and produce three crops a year in the fertile soil of China from the Yangtze basin south. China then led the world in non-agricultural technologies as well. At the start of the seventeenth century the British savant, politician, and bureaucrat Francis Bacon had marvelled at three inventions that he said had utterly transformed Europe: gunpowder, printing, and the compass. China had developed all three, and had developed all three before 1000.

China had long had the capability of launching its own "voyages of discovery"--and its governments had chosen not to. The one exception came under the early Ming dynasty: the fifteenth-century imperial court funded its own series of voyages of discovery commanded by the politically-powerful eunuch admiral Zeng He. The fleet reached Zanzibar, and touched Africa. Annoyed at their treatment by a Sri Lankan king, they captured him and brought him back to China to make his apology to the emperor. But the political balance in the Ming court changed, the follow-up expeditions were cancelled, and the exploration program abandoned.

China led the world in political organization as well. No other ruler's writ ran a third as far or has even a third as large a chance of being obeyed as that of China's emperor. Tang Dynasty cavalry has skirmished with Persians on the shores of the Aral Sea. The Sung Dynasty river navy was the only military force to even temporarily stymie Ghengis Khan's Mongols before his descendants took to fighting each other rather than expanding the empire. No pre-industrial central government anywhere ever managed to match the reach, extent, and power of the landlord-scholar-bureaucracy mode of domination invented under the Tang and developed under the Sung.

China in the twelfth century at its pre-industrial apogee produced more iron and saw a greater share of agricultural production sold on markets than Britain would produce and market in the eighteenth. Zheng He's mid-fifteenth century voyages of exploration sailed four times as far with twenty times as many sailors as Columbus, and could land ten times as many soldiers at Dar es Salaam and Trincomalee as Cortez would land at Vera Cruz. The Sung Dynasty capital, Hangzhou, was before the Mongol conquest the largest city in the world--larger than Baghdad or Constantinople or Cordova or Delhi--with perhaps half a million inhabitants: the closest thing to an economic, cultural, and political capital the twelfth-century world had.

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China's Relative Stagnation

But by the second half of the nineteenth century China's relative apogee was three-quarters of a millennium past, and the government and the people were in crisis. The people were in crisis because they were more than three times as numerous as their predecessors at the pre-industrial apogee, because they were ruled by a rapacious landed aristocracy, and because progress in agriculture and industry to counterbalance rising population had been nearly absent for most of the second millennium. In 1100 the Chinese people were rich, or at least as rich as pre-industrial peasant societies get. At the start of the second millennium development of new types of crops and new strains of rice had greatly boosted agricultural productivity and triggered the centuries-long spread of China's heartland from the Yellow River to the Yangtze and further south, to Hunan and Guangzhou. But by the second half of the nineteenth century Malthus was having his revenge. China had filled up, with more than 300 million people, which left average farm size less than third of what they had been three quarters of a millennium before, the bulk of peasant families were close to the edge. It is virtually certain that the average Chinese peasant family in the second half of the nineteenth century had less food than its predecessors in the twelfth: think of 1300 calories per person per day as a rough guess.

The technological dynamism and organizational relative edge that China had possessed in the twelfth century was gone as well. Chinese producers still had substantial technological edges in limited industrial segments: high end silk textiles, high-end porcelain, tea. But there had been little internally-driven technological progress in any industry for more than half a millennium. And the bureaucracy that in 1150 had looked efficient and powerful compared to a Europe--a place where no king would even think of asking an Earl of Pembroke to explain anything--by 1870 looked corrupt and incapable.

Why this 750 year relative stagnation is a great mystery. There are many potential suspects to take the blame as the root cause of China's long, long relative stagnation.

Perhaps the root problem was that emperors, grand secretaries, and landlords feared their own generals more than they feared their neighbors' soldiers. European kings, ministers, and landlords sought a strong military to protect them and theirs against the next William the Conqueror or Friedrich II or Francois I or Napoleon. In China there was little to fear from outside the empire as long as the Mongols were kept divided, but a great deal to be feared inside the empire from your own generals--men like the ninth-century An Lu-Shan or the seventeenth-century Three Feudatories. Thus the military-industrial-metallurgy-innovation complex that drove so much of pre-industrial and early-industrial European technological progress was absent.

Perhaps the root problem was that with triple-cropping rice strains the wet-rice fields were too fertile, the governmental bureaucracy too effective, and the avenues of establishment-oriented upward mobility to the striving and aggressive too open. After making a little money the logical next step was to buy some land. Because the land was rich, because labor was plentiful and cheap, and because the empire was (most of the time) strong internally, one could live well after turning one's wealth into land. One could also easily make the important social contacts to pave the way for one's children to advance further. And one's children could do the most important thing needed for upward mobility: study the Confucian classics and do well on the examinations: first the local shengyan, then the regional juren, and then the national jinshi.

Those who had successfully written their eight-legged essays and made proper allusions to and use of the Confucian classics would then join the landlord-scholar-bureaucrat aristocracy that ruled China and profited from the empire. In the process of preparing for the examinations and mastering the material needed to do well on them, they would acquire the habits of thought and values of a Confucian aristocrat landlord-scholar-bureaucrat. Entrepreneurial drive and talent was thus molded into an orthodox Confucian-aristocratic pattern and harnessed to the service of the regime and of the landlord class: good for the rents of the landlords, good for the stability of the government, but possibly very bad indeed for the long-run development of technology and organization. Carlson (1957) quotes an imperial edict of 1724 condemning mining as a potential source of disorder and treason:

[M]iners are easy to recruit but hard to disband. If mining is left to the initiative of merchants there wil be danger of crowds assembling and harboring treachery...

Perhaps the root problem was the absence of a new world rich in resources to exploit and helpless because of technological backwardness, or the lesser weight attached to instrumental rationality as a mode of thought, or the absence of dissenting hidey-holes for ideological unconformity, or the fact that the merchants and hand-manufacturers of China's cities were governed by landlords appointed by the central government rather than governing themselves, or that large muscled animals like oxen and horses turned out to be powerful productive multipliers for temperate rain-irrigated wheat-based agricultural but not for sub-tropical paddy-irrigated rice-based agriculture, or some combination of these, or any of a host of other possibilities over which historians will struggle inconclusively (but thoughtfully and fruitfully) for the rest of time.

Perhaps there were many root problems.

Whatever the cause, the result was China's extraordinary relative stagnation through much of the second millennium. The country and region that had been the world's leader--culturally, economically, organizationally--in 1200 was poor, economically backward, and organizationally decrepit.

The poverty struck eighteenth-century British moral philosopher Adam Smith hard, for in his view China had been for a long time "the richest... most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous" country in which even landless peasants were relatively rich: "the wages of labour had ever been more than sufficient to... enable him to bring up a family." Smith had a theory as to why the China he saw in his day--the late eighteenth century--had become poor. Because China would not trade with outsiders and so learn and adapt their ideas, it was bound to stagnate: "a country which neglects or despises foreign commerce... cannot transact the... business which it might do with different laws and institutions." A stagnant economy, Smith thought, was headed for desperate poverty through a Malthusian population crisis. Population would continue to grow while the economy did not. Without technological progress and with increasing population "competition... would soon reduce [wages] to this lowest rate which is consistent with common humanity." At that lowest rate of wages, children would be so malnourished as to be easy prey to disease and women's body fat levels would be so low that ovulation was hit-or-miss.

By the beginning of the twentieth century it looked like that Malthusian crisis had arrived. The more than 300 million people of late nineteenth-century China had no mechanized farm machinery and no industry-produced nitrogen fertilizers. They were crowded into the wet, arable eastern slice of what is "China" on today's maps, with the median family of 6 farming perhaps 4 acres at a time when the Radical Republicans were still hoping to somehow find 40 acres plus a mule for each family of American ex-slaves. Average adult height was, we think, significantly under five feet. There were enough landless and other desperate peasants that perhaps ten million joined the Taiping Rebellion of Hong Xiuquan--who declared himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ after repeatedly failing the shengyan exam--which burned through the Yangtze valley for nearly fifteen years. Perhaps ten million, 3% of China's population, died in that war alone.

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China's Crisis

Thus the era when the iron-hulled ocean-going steamships began to call on China was in era in which the government and the economy were in crisis for four reasons:

The first reason is that China's government in the late nineteenth century was the ethnically Manchurian Qing Dynasty, and the Qing Dynasty was weak because it had always been weak. It had seized power in the mid-seventeenth century. An ethnic clan of non-proper-Chinese military adventurers from beyond the Great Wall, from Manchuria, struck at the moment when the previous Ming Dynasty was paralyzed by peasant revolts and hamstrung by a run of bad emperors and more-than-usually-corrupt bureaucrats. The Manchu were unified because they were not Han Chinese: what Manchu prince or mercenary could expect to long survive a victory by any alternative faction? The Manchu were weak because they were not Han Chinese: how many of the 300 million Chinese would give how much loyalty to a ruling dynasty in which the top places were reserved for others?

It was the classic problem of colonial rule. The Manchus tried to solve it by (a) presenting themselves as ideal Confucian sage-kings (presenting themselves as more righteous Confucian rulers than Kung-Fu-Tze himself), (b) giving the landlords through which they ruled free rein throughout central and southern China (curbing rapacious landlords in the interest of protecting the Old Hundred names of China was not on the Qing Dynasty agenda, ever), and (c) opposing all change for change threatened to cause instability and the Qing Dynasty knew that it was unstable already.

This worked as a political strategy: the Qing Dynasty had a run of 250 years, and the last Qing emperor still sat a throne--albeit as a puppet of the Japanese army--in 1945. But it meant that the kind of national and nationalist appeals that those who in Japan spoke for the Emperor Meiji or that Mongkut and Chulalongkorn used to try to preserve the independence of Thailand were impossible for China's late nineteenth-century government. You cannot rally a people against foreign colonialists with the slogan "revere the emperor and expel the barbarians!" when for more than 200 years the emperor has defined himself as a barbarian.

Even in the days of its peak strength, the Qing Dynasty found it wise to tolerate dominant currents of thought that viewed its coming to power as a tragedy and its rule as profoundly illegitimate. Jonathan Spence's In Search of Modern China notes the performances at the court of the Kangxi emperor, the first strong and long-lived Qing dynasty emperor, of "The Peach-Blossom Fan" by Kong Shangren--an author still loyal to the previous Ming Dynasty, and hostile to the idea that a scholar-official could win honor by helping the Manchu conquerors rule China: "[A]t the play's end, with the Ming resistance in ruins, the lovers agree to take monastic vows... the surviving virtuous officials retreat deep into the mountains to escape a summons from the Qing that they take up office."

The second reason that China in the late nineteenth century was that Confucian landlord-bureaucrat-scholar aristocracy through which the Qing Dynasty ruled was not only potentially disloyal but trained to be incapable. As long as the Mongols were kept divided through bribes and the ruling dynasty uncorrupt, no Chinese emperor faced any outside existential military threat. Internal disorder was the main worry. So the central government had discouraged military skill among its bureaucrats and notables since the Tang dynasty rebellion of An Lushan, and discouraged any liking for change--a potential cause of disorder--since the first Ming dynasty emperor had expelled the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan in the fourteenth century.

As Jonathan Spence also points out, seventeenth-century landlord-scholar-bureaucratic notables like Ming loyalist Kong Shangren were well aware of growing European technological developments:

White glass from across the Western Seas
Is imported through Macao:
Fashioned into lenses big as coins,
They encompass the eyes in a double frame.
I put them on--it suddenly becomes clear;
I can see the very tips of things!
And read fine print by the dim-lit window
Just like in my youth.

Yet neither Kong Shangren nor any of his relatives and descendants ever thought that the optical glass business was worth studying or researching or entering or even financing. It was simply not the kind of thing that a Confucian gentleman would do. One consequence of this lamentable uncuriosity was extraordinary ignorance about the outside world. During the first Opium War of 1840 the staff of High Commissioner Lin, the Qing plenipotentiary on the spot in Canton, appears to have debated whether an embargo of ginseng rhubarb exports might be enough all on its own to win the war for China--the British, they had heard somewhere, needed ginseng as a dietary supplement to have regular bowel movements, and would die without it.

The third reason China's government was in crisis was that the people were in crisis. As I noted above, China's population was on the downswing of a Malthusian population cycle. Compared to the aftermath of the great wave of agricultural technological development nearly a millennium before, the threefold growth in population meant that yields per person low, farms small, and peasants poor--hence malnourished, and with relatively little energy. Population growth also meant larger clans of landlords to be fed off the rents. Combined with an alien ruling dynasty that feels weak and threatened by its own upper class and tells its bureaucrats that it is justice when the landlords win, this means that the peasants have very little to lose. Thus peasant revolts--like those that everyone remembered had brought down dynasties before--burned through China in the mid-nineteenth century.

The greatest was the Taiping Rebellion. The Manchu banner-armies proved useless when Hong Xiuquan proclaimed the "Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace" and promised his followers not only the Kingdom of Heaven in the hereafter (where he would reign alongside his elder brother Jesus Christ) but that land would be equally divided after all the landlords were killed down here--meaning a roughly fifty percent increase in median peasant standards of living. And Hong Xiuquan supplemented his brand of theocratic landlord-free authoritarian communism with anti-Manchu nationalism: "Ever since the Manchus poisoned China... the poison of corruption has defiled the emperor's throne..." 1300 calories per day versus 2000 plus God on your side plus revenge against the oppressive landlords plus the expulsion of the barbarian Manchus.

The fifteen-year march of the Taiping through south-central China and reign from Nanjing had echoes not just of previous peasant rebellions (like the one that had given the Manchus their opening in the 1640s at the end of the Ming dynasty) but of what Mao Zedong and company would do from 1925 to 1945. Move into a village, get the peasants' hands dirty by having them kill a couple of landlords, divide up the land so all the small peasants are much richer, point out that if the landlord-backed authorities return they will all be in big trouble, and ask for volunteers to join the army and come along to the next village.

The Taiping prohibited opium, foot-binding, prostitution, and female servitude. They instituted equal shares for all, vaccination, low taxes, and encouraged tea and silk exports. Hugh Deane quotes American missionary E.C. Bridgeman's report that the Taiping "appear[ed] like a new race of warriors... well-clad, well-fed, and well-provided for... content and in high spirits, as if sure of success," and asserts that twentieth century Communist leaders like Mao Zedong, Zhu Te, and Peng Dehaui drew inspiration from the stories of the Taiping heroes that they had grown up with in Hunan, Sichuan, and Nanjing.

Outside observers like Karl Marx were impressed enough that they thought that the World Revolution was starting in the late 1850s in China, and that the last moments of the Chinese empire had come. But competent local landlords organized pickup militias, some of which grew into competent--but non-Manchu--battalions and brigades. The merchants and bankers of Shanghai and other ports in contact with and profiting from European trade were desperate for help and knew how to draw on European military-technological competence. The thirty year-old Frederick Ward Townsend--with, Deane reports, two years' experience as a military cadet in Norwich, Vermont followed by service as a Texas Ranger, a Mexican army drill instructor, and in the Crimean War--organized an army on the British Indian sepoy model: officers from Europe and America, rifles and carbines and cannon supplied by the British government, high pay, and river mobility through steampower. The Qing court heard such good things about his army from Li Hongzhang, their commander on the spot, that they named Ward's army "The Undefeatables." Ward was killed at Ningbo in 1862, but his successor the British General Charles "Chinese" Gordon's army proved equally capable. The Taiping were crushed in 1864. China's political revolution was postponed for half a century, and the Qing Dynasty continued to rule until 1911.

The fourth reason China's government was in crisis was that it was so weak relative to the forces that first Britain and later other European powers began to project into the western Pacific.

After 1800 British merchants discovered one commodity besides silver that Indian producers could supply and that Chinese consumers were eager to buy: opium. By the end of the 1830s the Chinese government was beginning to worry about the consequences of opium addiction on the country, and the exchange of European silver for Chinese goods had turned around: the bulk of the China trade was the exchange of Chinese silver for Indian-grown opium. The Chinese government attempted to suppress the opium trade and opium smuggling. The result was the 1839-1842 "Opium War," in which the British fleet intervened on the side of free trade, the sale of opium, and drug addiction. The British Empire acquired the then nearly barren island of Hong Kong as a base, European influence was established in a substantial number of "treaty ports" along the Chinese coast, and the division of China not into European colonies but into regions in the "spheres of influence" of different European powers began.

In the mid-1880s the Qing Dynasty, having bought foreign metal-working machinery and built a navy, arsenals, and docks, thought it was strong enough to oppose the French conquest of Vietnam. The fleet was destroyed in an hour. Jonathan Spence reports that the Chinese navy lost 572 dead, while the French lost five. In 1895 the Qing Dynasty thought it was strong enough to oppose the Japanese extension of their sphere of influence to Korea. It was wrong. The Treaty of Shimonoseki added Taiwan, Korea, and southern Manchuria to Japan's sphere of influence. European and American mercenaries, concessionaires, merchants and manufacturers went where they wanted, did what they wanted, and enforced whatever laws they thought were good.

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The Failure of "Self-Strengthening" in China

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in the last years of the Qing empire and the first years of the Republic of China, economic growth and development took place around China's coastal fringes in and near foreign enclaves, but not elsewhere. In 1910 China had only a million cotton spindles--one for every 400 people. Contrast that to Britain, that had two spindles per person in 1910. In 1910 China mined 10M tons of coal--that's 40 pounds per person per year. In 1929 China produced 20K tons of steel--less than two ounces per person per year. It produced 400K tons of iron--that's 1.6 pounds per person per year. It mined 27M tons of coal--that's 100 pounds per person per year. Compare this to America's 700 pounds of steel per capita in 1929 or 200 pounds in 1900, or to America's 8000 pounds of coal per capita in 1929 or 5000 pounds of coal per capita in 1900.

China specialists see and can almost touch an alternative history in which late-nineteenth century China managed to match the political and economic achievements of Meiji Japan. They see an alternative in which China stood up economically, politically, and organizationally. Japan, after all, won its short victorious war against Russia in 1905, negotiated as an equal with Britain and the U.S. over warship construction in 1921, and was perhaps the eighth industrial power in the world by 1929. Why couldn't China have done the same?

Jonathan Spence, for example, praises the nineteenth century:

Confucian statesmen [like Li Hongzhang] whose skill, integrity, and tenacity helped suppress the [Taiping and other] rebellions... showed how imaginatively the Chinese could respond to new challenges... managed to develop new structures to handle foreign relations and collect customs dues, to build modern ships and weapons, and to start teaching international law and the rudiments of modern science.... It was true that there remained complex problems... rural militarization... local autonomy over taxation... landlord abuses... bureaucratic corruption... bellicose foreign powers.... But with forceful imperial leadership and a resolute Grand Council, it appeared that the Qing Dynasty might regain some of its former strength...

And laments that:

forceful leadership was not forthcoming... the empress dowager Cixi... coregent for her son Tongzhi from 1861-73... coregent for her nephew Guangxu from 1875-89.... [A]bsolute political authority... while Guangxu [was imprisoned in the palace]... on her orders from 1898-1908.... Cixi had clashed badly in 1869 with Prince Gong.... Zeng Guofan died in 1872... Wenxiang died in 1876... Zuo Zongtang remained preoccupied with the pacification of the Muslims in [Xinjiang].... The grand councilors... worthy... with distinguished careers... lacked the skill or initiative to direct China on a new course. Although self-strengthening programs continued to be implemented... a disproportionate number of them were initiated by one man, Li Hongzhang... governor-general of Hebei... commissioner of trade for the northern ports...

We economists are more skeptical. We note that the "new structures to... collect customs dues" consisted of things like the Qing Imperial Maritime Customs Service build up in the 1860s under Robert Hart--no Chinese officials allowed. We note that the enormous bureaucracies that allegedly managed the Yellow River dike works and the Grand Canal had grown corrupt and incompetent. We note that the Qing could not get their local officials to collect the salt tax. We do not find it satisfactory to attribute China's stagnation through the first decade of the twentieth century to poor choice of ministers by the dowager empress Cixi--even though Spence is following in a long tradition that treats her as the original mold for the figure of the Dragon Lady.

Let's go back to Jonathan Spence's observation that "a disproportionate number" of self-strengthening attempts to adapt and use modern technologies were due to "Li Hongzhang... governor-general of Hebei... commissioner of trade for the northern ports..." Li Hongzhang's achievements were indeed impressive: the 1877 Kaiping coal mine, in 1878 cotton mills in Shanghai, the Tianjin arsenal, the telegraph between Tianjin and Peking, a seven-mile railroad to ship from Kaiping to the river and then downriver to Tianjin, and so forth. And what wasn't undertaken by Li Hongzhang appears likely to have been undertaken by Zhang Zhidong, governor-general of Hunan-Hubei for two decades: the railroad from Hankou to Beijing, the Wuhan Han-Ye-Ping heavy industrial complex. In the last generation of the Qing empire, individual governors-general who made economic development a top priority could make some things happen--elsewhere it didn't, save to some degree in and next to the foreign concessions and treaty ports: Qingdao, Tientsin, Shanghai, Guangdong, Hong Kong.

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Manufacturing Location at the Start of the Twentieth Century

It is understandable that China, India, and the other non-European and non-settler-colony regions of the world did not in the years before World War I produce and export the relatively high-value commodities like wheat and wool exported by temperate settler economies: agricultural productivity was too low, and climate was unfavorable. It is understandable why--with heavy downward pressure put on wages in Malaysia, Kenya, and Colombia by migration and threatened migration from very low-wage China and India--the prices of the export commodities that they did produce were and remained relatively low.

What is more puzzling is why industrialization did not spread much more rapidly in the years before World War I. After all, the example of the industrial core seemed easy to follow. Inventing the technologies of the original industrial revolution--steam power, spinning mills, automatic looms, iron- and steel-making, and railroad-building--had required many independent strokes of genius. But copying the technologies did not, especially when you could buy and cheaply ship industrial capital goods made in the same New and Old England machine shops that supplied the industries of England and of America.

As industries in the industrial core became more and more mechanized--more and more characterized by what would be called "mass production"--they should have become more and more vulnerable to foreign competition from other, lower wage countries. Even at the start of the twentieth century, the U.S. had the highest wage level in the world; inside the U.S., firms devoted immense time, energy, and thought to redesigning their production processes so that lower-skilled, and lower paid, workers could replace highly-skilled craftsmen. One would think that manufacturing would have fled the United States even in the late nineteenth century. If Ford could redesign production immediately after World war I so that semi-skilled assembly line workers could do what highly-skilled craftsmen used to do, why couldn't Ford also--or someone else--redesign production before World War I so that it could be carried out by low wage Peruvians or Poles or Kenyans rather than by Americans, who were extraordinarily expensive labor by world standards eve back then?

Industries do migrate, but they have done so surprisingly slowly in the twentieth century. One reason is added risk: political risk of all kinds tends to make investors wary of committing their money in places where it is easy to imagine political disruptions from the left or the right. Moreover, there are substantial advantages for a firm in keeping production in the industrial core, near to other machines and near other factories making similar products. It is much easier to keep the machines running. A reliable infrastructure is much more likely to be found in the industrial core. And so are the services of specialists needed to fix the many things that can go wrong: minimum efficient scale for an industrial civilization can be far larger than the apparent minimum efficient scale for a plant.

Arthur Lewis hypothesized that barriers to starting up an export-oriented industry were large, that infant industries on the periphery of the world economy had to rely on domestic demand, and that where domestic demand was low because of mass poverty modern industry could not flourish. Thus only a small share of output in what was to become the third world came from the industries of the industrial revolution. But we still understand far too little about why the pace of technological diffusion out of the industrial core was so slow back before World War I: why "peripheral" economies did such a good job at specializing in plantation agriculture for export, and such a bad job at creating modern manufacturing industries.

Gregory Clark at the University of California at Davis has counted the staffing levels--how many operatives for each machine--at textile firms worldwide early in the twentieth cenury, and found enormous differences in how many workers watch, operate, and maintain the same machine across countries and continents. It is not that places where labor is abundant use the same machines more efficiently: it is that it appears to take many times the workforce to achieve the same level of machine performance. Clark argues that in 1910 typical labor productivity in English-speaking countries in cotton spinning was fifteen times that of China, ten times that of Japan, three times that of Mexico or Russia, and twice that of continental northern Europe. Workforces in the industrial core appear to have had an acquaintance with machines and how they work, which was very, very hard to duplicate.

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The Kaiping Coal Mines

Let's take a look at one of these in detail: the first one, the Kaiping coal mine. We are lucky in that we can draw on Ellsworth Carlson's 1957 Harvard east asian monograph to understand how and to what extent Li Hongzhang could midwife modern coal-mining technology in late-nineteenth century China.

In 1877 Li Hongzhang--a senior scholar-landlord-bureaucrat high in the confidence of the Qing court--joined forces with Tang Tingshu--a prominent, experienced, and wealthy treaty port comprador-merchant who had managed Jardine, Matheson's interests along the Yangtze--to establish a modern, industrial, large-scale coal mine in Kaiping, in Chihli. Li Hongzhang and Tang Tingshu faced unusual forms of opposition to their mining plans. Carlson quotes a British cable of 1882 stating that mining work had been stopped because Chi Shihchang, a vice-president of the Board of Civil Offices, had declared that "foreign mining methods angered the earth dragon... [and so] the late empress could not rest quietly in her grave" sixty miles away from Kaiping:

The Governor-General [Li Hongzhang] has been ordered to make inquiry and report... work has partially ceased.... Either he must throw over a company... formed with his direct sanction... [and] a very large quantity of capital, or he must... declare the mines harmless with the knowledge that he will then be considered responsible for any bodily ailment or other ill which may befall the Emperor or his family...

Tang Tingshu had originally proposed to build a steam railway to get the coal from the mines to the port of Tientsin, but dropped that idea and replace it with a proposal for a seven mile mule-drawn tramway to be connected to a twenty-one mile canal. Shen Pao-chen had in 1877 dismantled China's first railway--the Shanghai-Woosung. According to David Pong, Li Hongzhang was furious, blaming the destruction on Shen's narrow-mindedness and his desire to curry favor with anti-foreign elements. Moreover, the Manchu court had just rejected Liu Mingchuan's request for permission to build railways. When the mining began and the tramway started up, however, there were no mules: there was a locomotive--the "Rocket of China" with, engineer Claude Kinder reported, a boiler from "a portable winding engine, the wheels had been purchased as scrap castings, the frames... made of cast iron." Ellsworth Carlson believes that Li Hongzhang and Tang Tingshu were able to get their steam railroad going because of three reasons. First, it was built in a remote and sparsely populated area with no Confucian scholar-landlord-bureaucrats around. Second, Li Hongzhang used all his political skills to keep the existence of the steam railroad. Third, Carlson believes that Li had the blessing of the empress dowager Cixi to proceed--and thus her protection from his superiors on the Grand Council and elsewhere.

Tang Tingshu and Li Hongzhang persevered. Production began with modern machinery in 1881 excavating coal seams about ten feet in diameter 200, 300 and 500 feet down. 200 tons of coal a day were excavated by 1883. By 1889, 3000 workers in three shifts were producing was 700 tons of coal a day, nearly 500 pounds per worker per day, using steam lifts underground coal cars on rails, and pneumatic drills--but still only two pounds a year for every person in China. At the end of 1888 a railway to carry the coal from Kaiping down to Taku was finally opened. But it could not be extended to Tientsin. As chief engineer Claude Kinder wrote:

high officials who detested the railway... foster[ed] trouble with the junk people.... So great was the clamor... that the Viceroy... gave the order for the nearly completed bridge [over the Peiho to Tientsin] to be destroyed, although hundreds of the largest junks had already safely passed through...

Starting in 1889 the company began paying dividends: annual dividends amounted to 10 to 12% on the company's equity capital of 1.5M taels--about £150,000 pounds, or $750,000 dollars of the time. The mine had 3000 workers in 1889, and 9000 in 1900, paid about $6 a month (with the highest-paid Chinese-born technical employees earning some $60). About four miners died each year. As Herbert Hoover reported to his bosses at Bewick, Moreing: "The disregard for human life permits cheap mining by economy in timber [supports].... The aggrieved relatives are amply compensated by... $30 per man.... cases have been proved of suicide for that amount..." Hoover's judgment was that the miners were producing 1/4 to 1/8 of what was expected of miners in America or Australia. By 1912 Kaiping was producing 1.4M tons of coal a year--seven pounds for each person in China--and accounted for perhaps 20% of China's total coal production.

Without the aegis of Li Hongzhang and his position as governor, the enterprise is unlikely to have survived. Ellsworth Carswell quotes Tang Shouchien on the difficulties that merchants and entrepreneurs had outside the coastal foreign concessions: "The officials have rights; the merchants have no rights; their influence does not go beyond the bringing together of capital; and naturally the profits of the merchants are lost to the officials ceaselessly..." Even with his aegis, not everything went smoothly. Carswell quotes the North China Herald of June 24, 2007 as pessimistic about the future of Kaiping as a capitalist economic enterprise: "if a mine is at a promising state, Kaiping to wit, the kinsmen of the Director, Managers, and officials, come in shoals, and without the slightest regard to competence are provided with posts and fatten..." But as long as Li Hongzhang was in control and his attention was focused on making the mine a successful economic enterprise, Tang Tingshu, his team, and his specialist foreign engineers could do their work. Their position, however, was shaky, for the mine was both a public governmental project and a private capitalist enterprise: shang-pan kuan-tu: official supervision and merchant management. This meant that each manager of the mine wore two hats: on the one hand, they were intendants in the Qing administrative bureaucracy with jurisdiction not over a town and its villages but over a mining enterprise, and on the other hand they were employees of the shareholders. Should push come to shove, it would turn out that they worked for the governor of Chihli rather than the shareholders of the company.

Mine director-general Tang Tingshu died in 1892. His successor was a very different man. Tang Tingshu was a merchant. Chang Yenmao was a bannerman--a hereditary retainer of Prince Qun. Tang Tingshu was a merchant who had worked extensively for British bosses. Chang Yenmao was a retainer and fixer. He had little education. In spite of his lack of literary attainment, he somehow acquired official rank, played on his connections with the empress dowager Cixi, and was slotted to become an intendant in Kaingsu when the director-generalship of Kaiping fell vacant. In The Making of Herbert Hoover, Rose Wilder Lane, claims that Chang Yenmao played a key role in Cixi's coup of 1885 when she placed the Gwangxu emperor on the throne.

By 1900 Chang Yenmao--once a poor bannerman and retainer--was one of the wealthiest men in Tientsin. When Herbert Hoover looked at the books of Taiping in 1901, he reported that the 9000-worker payroll had been padded by 6000 names, and that the director of personnel doing the padding and collecting the wages had paid Chang Yenmao $50,000 for the post. Chang Yenmao's company paid £20000--$100000--a year in dividends. After Herbert Hoover took over as director-general in 1901, he was able to pay out £150,000--$750,000--a year.

Herbert Hoover? you say. Yes, Herbert Hoover: at the time a 26 year old mining engineer on the make, later to become the architect of food relief to Europe after World War I to prevent mass starvation, the wonder-working Commerce Secretary during the Roaring Twenties, and president during the slide into the Great Depression.

What happened was this: Herbert Hoover, mining expert, arrived in Tientsin in 1900 just in time to be besieged in the city by the Boxers (a better translation for this grassroots uprising influenced and encouraged but not controlled by the Forbidden City would have been "Fighters United for Justice"). In Tientsin Hoover met Gustav Detring of the China Maritime Customs Service, a friend of Chang Yenmao's. He also met Chang Yenmao. Chang had fled to Tientsin as well, fearing that the Boxers would execute him as a corrupt puppet of the Europeans; in Tientsin, however, the Europeans arrested Chang--fearing, probably correctly, that he was passing intelligence to the besieging Boxer armies as a way of hedging his bets. The British charge d'affaires on the scene later said that Chang "ought to have been shot in 1900."

Somehow Detring and Hoover, probably, got Chang released from prison. Somehow Chang decided to reincorporate the Kaiping mines as a British-flag enterprise incorporated in London in order, he said, to make it easier to raise capital to expand the mines and to provide some political cover: Russian or Japanese proconsuls would love to confiscate a working Chinese-flag industrial property as reparations or indemnities, but would not dare touch a British-flag industrial property. Chang commissioned Detring and then Detring and Chang commissioned Hoover and then Hoover commissioned his boss C. Algernon Moreing back in London to do the deal.

The old company had owned the mine works, had little spare cash, and had owed £250,000--$1.25M--in bonds that paid 12% per year interest. When the dust cleared, the new company owned the mine works, had about £250,000 in free cash, and owed £500,000 in bonds that paid 6% per year interest. When the dust cleared, the shareholders of the old company found that they owned 37.5% of the new company, and that C. Algernon Moreing and his friends owned 62.5% of the new company without having contributed more than a few cents to the enterprise. The old company had been controlled completely by Chang Yenmao in his dual status as director-general both elected by the shareholders and appointed by the governor of Chihli. The new company was controlled completely by Herbert Hoover as the representative on the spot of the London majority shareholders. The old company had a management and advanced technical staff of 620 Chinese managers and 10 foreign-born engineers and foremen. The new company had a management and advanced technical staff of 170: 120 from china and 50 from abroad. The new company also had a Europeans-only club.

Charge d'affaires Townley was disgusted. He wrote to Britain's foreign secretary, Lord Salisbury, recommending against the British government's "giv[ing] its countenance to a financial transaction which had fleeced Chinese shareholders and lined the pockets of an Anglo-Belgian gang.... Moreing and others have made a pretty pile at the expense of the Chinese.... legally the Board of Directors were unassailable... but... morally they were in the wrong." Others were upset as well--especially Detring and Chang Yenmao. Townley's interpretation was that they were "wild... [because] they thought themselves rather smarter... and got themselves fairly had by a Yankee man of straw [Hoover] acting for Moreing..."

We have a pretty good idea of what Algernon Moreing and Herbert Hoover would have said if they could have been gotten to speak truthfully about the transaction. First, they would have said, if we had not done the deal then the Russians would have confiscated the mine in 1901 as reparations: we brought the British flag's protection to the table, and that is easily worth 62.5% of the company. We gave the original-company shareholders 37.5%, while the Russians would have given them zero. Second, they would have said, Chang Yenmao was a corrupt thief stealing from the company and untouchable because of the protection of the governor of Chihli. 6000 extra workers at $50 a year is $300,000 a year, at least, stolen from the company. Third, they would have said, Chang Yenmao is neither a mining engineer nor a merchant. Herbert Hoover is both, and can make the mine run. 37.5% of the $750,000 a year in dividends that the new company paid is about $270,000--almost three times the $100,000 the old company paid. We did the original shareholders three big favors, they would have said, and 62.5% of the company is a bargain for all we have done.

Chang Yenmao was displeased. He had to explain to the new governor of Chihli, the formidable Yuan Shihkai, why the Imperial flag was not being flown over the mine, which meant that he had to admit that he had conspired or western sharpies had tricked him or something had happened by which the Kaiping mines were now the property of a British-Belgian investors' syndicate. Yuan Shihkai was then displeased:

Although Kaiping had sold commercial shares, it was not a private property that could be bought or sold by people like Chang and Hoover. The mines had not been started... [until] Li Hongzhang had... obtained imperial approval... they could not be alienated without imperial approval.... Chang, said Yuan, was a person of humble origins to whom the country had given great favors, but he had not been properly grateful... [had sold] mining land [to foreigners] without authority... deceived the throne... about Chinese-foreign joint management.... If unpunished, Chang's action might become a precedent... losses of the country's mines, the merchant's capital, and the dynasty's ports...

It turned out that in the process of browbeating Chang Yenmao, Herbert Hoover had signed a "Memorandum of Understanding" that the change of corporate form would not alter Chang Yenmao's status: that he would remain director-general of the mine "as before." Chang Yenmao, ordered to recover the mines, went to London and sued. One British judge was shocked at the deception and dishonor, and ruled that the "Memorandum" was a valid instrument that had to be followed by the new company. Other British judges in London ruled that the "Memorandum" was a valid instrument only insofar as the powers granted Chang by the memorandum were legal according to British corporate law, but that those powers weren't. In the end Yuan Shihkai started up another coal company with rights to much more extensive deposits in the area, and the two were amicably merged. Later on, Herbert Hoover scrambled as he launched his political career to buy up and destroy all copies of the trial record containing his testimony--missing the one in Oxford's Bodleian Library.

As Albert Feuerworker summed up the story of Kaiping in the 1959 Journal of Asian Studies:

Despite its pioneering achievements, Kaiping faltered... [like] other kuan-tu shang-pan enterprises in the late nineteenth century. The first was the lack of sufficient capital and the inability to raise more from domestic sources. The second was the unpropitious political environment into which it was born. Little aid could be expected from the tottering Manchu regime either in the form of financial assistance to compensate for the reluctance of private investors, or protection from foreign encroachment such as eventuated in British domination of this enterprise.... [T]he contrast with the history of early industrial efforts in Meiji Japan is a striking one...

Feuerworker sees three things going wrong: no private capital, a poor cash-strapped government that could not contribute public capital, and a weak government that could not protect incipient enterprises against rapacious foreigners. These three were certainly important, yes, but I see three others that were even more important:

• a social-economic structure that could not find and promote executives, but instead replaced Tang Tingshu with a corrupt political fixer like Chang Yenmao
• a political-ritual culture that required that a modernizing governor focus his attention constantly on the enterprise and run interference to protect it from anti-modernizers
• an educational system that continued to turn out literati instead of engineers and thus required foreign technical personnel for everything

The fact is that, outside the charmed circles created by the extraterritorial foreign concessions, and to a slight degree the immediate span of control of the few modernizing governors, modern industries did not develop and modern technologies were simply not applied in late imperial China. The typical Qing bureaucrat was hostile. But the typical Qing bureaucrat was also interested. There was rough equilibrium in how much money Qing bureaucrats were expected to squeeze from landlords (not that much), merchants and traders (significant but limited), and others who needed government action (as much as they could grab). New people doing new things had no customary, social, or countervailing power protections against their overlords. And overlords with limited intelligence, limited types of experience, and limited official tenure could not be expected to nurture economic growth when there were loose assets to be stripped. And, as the shareholders of Kaiping and Chang Yenmao discovered, to flee into the arms of foreign legal systems was to flee from Scylla to Charybdis.

---

China's First Revolution: 1911

The loss of the Japanese-Chinese War in 1895 brought matters to a head: was the government going to make a more serious effort to mobilize the country for modernization and progress or not? The Guangxu emperor said yes: he allied himself with reformer Kang Youwei and launched the "hundred days of reform" of 1898. The dowager empress Cixi--who we have seen before as patron and protector of modernizer Li Hongzhang--said no. she imprisoned the emperor inside the palace and encouraged the grassroots "Fighters United for Justice" to see what would happen. The attempt to mobilize anti-European sentiment to support the conservative regime failed, as an all-European expeditionary force relieved the beseiged European embassies in Beijing, exacted indemnities, and wreaked destruction. A tack back to the left was not possible. Kang Youwei's memoranda on such things as the partition of weak-government poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria and on the successful Meiji reforms in Japan could still be read, but Cixi had executed Kang Youwei's younger brother and other reformers in 1898. And when Sun Yatsen had offered his services to Li Hongzhang in 1894, Li had sent him away.

Sun Yatsen built up a financial and propaganda network among Chinese emigrants beyond the reach of the government. Military politicians like Yuan Shihkai came to the conclusion that working with the Manchu court was useless. And at the beginning of 1912 the last Chinese imperial dynasty fell, as Yuan Shihkai and his peers refused to suppress Sun Yatsen's rebellions. The six-year-old emperor abdicated. But the new Chinese republic's president was military politician Yuan Shihkai. And his authority over his peers and near peers--army commanders, provincial governors, and other would-be warlords--was nil. China descended into near-anarchy. On a provincial scale, order was maintained by "warlords": military politicians with soldiers at their command who chose local gentry notables to maintain order in the countryside and chose mayors and councillors in the cities. They taxed and plundered what they could, and their soldiers taxed and plundered and fought. It would take until the end of the 1920s before China had anything that could be called a functioning government again.

Comments

[Tyler Blalock]

It looks pretty good so far!

I think you may have omitted a few key things:

1) The impact of the treaty ports and the Opium Wars probably deserves more space

2) The Sino-Japanese war

Especially in the treatment of the Sino-Japanese war, it is important to emphasize the different approaches China and Japan took to the west, and how the Japanese approach worked out very well for Japan, while the Chinese approach did not work well at all. I think that the key difference is that in Japan, the Shogunate was disbanded due to internal strife (the Boshin war), and was replaced with a new ruling class which modernized the country. In China the ruling elites were able to hold on to power, and quashed the self-strengthening movement.

One of the possible reasons for the failure of the self-strengthening movement is that in the Qing system, provincial governors were rotated around China every few years in order to offset the chances of corruption or local favoritism taking root. Thus a modernizing governor would only have a few years to build up an infrastructure, and would depart for another province. The new incoming governor, if not a modernizer, would abandon or even remove the infrastructure and as a result the improvements would be short-lived.

[anne]

A careful reading and another coming, but I rather like what you have done. Now to read again and think.

[iris]

"In 1100 the Chinese people were rich, or at least as rich as pre-industrial peasant societies get."

I don't think you want to say it this way. China historians commonly point out how rich the Chinese were a millenium ago, then also add "at least compared to the Europeans.

For a few centuries, China's GDP per capita was 25% to 40% higher than Western Europe, or "25% to 40% richer than dirt poor." At $750/yr, they were also dirt poor with the same life expectancy as the Europeans.

Western Europe caught China by 1200 and never looked back. Unfortunately, at the same time, China never looked forward.

[green apron monkey]

I've always wondered if the relative price of labor had something to do with China's late development.

It seems to me that the demand for innovative ways to use capital equipment is greatly reduced by a large and poor population. After all, why waste a lot of time and money on equipment when you can just hire an excess of workers to do it on the cheap.

To this very day when a Chinese building is torn down, it's often done not by a crane or a wrecking ball, but by a bunch of guys with hammers.

Anyway, just a thought, I have no idea if it holds up to serious scrutiny.

I'm not sure I know who would be well qualified to write an economic history of early 20th century China or even consult on one. My only source on the subject has also been Jonathan Spence. But I suspect that the development economist Scott Rozelle (currently of Stanford) would know someone who could help.

[lee]

It's very good. But coal comes in seams not seems.

[andres]

I caught one mistake while skimming this long post (good job, btw):

"By 1870 it looked like that Malthusian crisis had arrived. The more than 300 million people of late nineteenth-century China had no mechanized farm machinery and no industry-produced nitrogen fertilizers. "

(1) I could be wrong, but while wheat and even corn production were well-mechanized by 1870, there was no mechanized machinery that I've read of to harvest rice--that came later. (2) No country on earth had industry-produced nitrogen fertilizers in 1870. Synthetic fertilizers wouldn't be produced until just before WWI, thanks to those blockheaded German chemists.

[Theobald Smith]

Standardize with one romanization system, preferably pinyin. Hong Kong and Shanghai are the same in all systems, but Tientsin = Tianjin and Canton = Guangzhou.

Zeng He is Zheng He in pinyin, Yuan Shih-kai should be Yuan Shikai and Kung Fu Tze is Kong Fu Zi.

And while horses and oxen may not be a productive multiplier for paddy-based agriculture, water buffalo certainly are. (Wikipedia is the quickest cite for this, but others certainly exist.)

[bo]

Is it not strange that the nations conquered by the Mongols (China, Russia, Iran) are the most opposed to the West? Consider Japan, Korea and China - Korea benefited from US the most, Japan is the one that suffered the most - and yet Japan is closest to the West, and both Korea and China have a very strong anti-American sentiment.

[Gwailo]

What about Roberto Unger's notion, in Plasticity Into Power, http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/unger/english/insti.php pp. 50 - 61
that agrarian/bureaucratic empires tend to cyclic collapse or "reversion to natural economy", and that Ch'ing statecraft aimed at and succeeded in stabilizing the empire, tho at the price of technological stagnation?
"The people who lived in the Chinese Empire were no different from the ordinary run of humanity in their ability to go through life in a daze miraculously combining an empty-headed deference to ruling prejudice with a level-headed eye for the main chance."

[shah8]

More and more, as I read more history material, I believe that Napoleon and the Napoleonic era was rather fundamental in forcing changes to general elite attitudes towards competent subordinates (your point number one of really important factors). Northeast Europe had modernized, but so much of Europe had the same attitudes of Chinese leadership, especially in Austria-Hungary and Russia.

[tomas]

"In 1100 the Chinese people were rich, or at least as rich as pre-industrial peasant societies get."

I don't think you want to say it this way. China historians commonly point out how rich the Chinese were a millenium ago, then also add "at least compared to the Europeans.

For a few centuries, China's GDP per capita was 25% to 40% higher than Western Europe, or "25% to 40% richer than dirt poor." At $750/yr, they were also dirt poor with the same life expectancy as the Europeans.

Western Europe caught China by 1200 and never looked back. Unfortunately, at the same time, China never looked forward."

Europe got nowhere near China in terms of economic development in 1200 or 1600 for that matter. Historic GDP estimates are most likely utterly useless and per capita measurements are also pretty useless in preindustrial societies in terms of measuring the economic capabilities of a "nation". Since any per capita gain will be eaten up by mathusian pressure, population is a better measure of the productive capabilities of a society.

The technological edge of europe only develope in the 18th and 19th century not in the middle ages and early modern times where europeans basically just copied inventions from the east.

Also in the opium wars it was not just the wish to defend society against opium but also a political move within the Qing state, which was split between manchu rulers and han bureaucrats. There is a great radio show on "in our time" (BBC 4) on the opium wars. I am sure it would be easy to dig up articles from some of the guest on the show as a quick booster on the opium wars.

By the way Brad, if it isnt already in your reading pile, you should get "the eastern origins of western development" by John? Hobson. Its a great antidote to the Landes (et al) euro-centrist view of economic history.

[tomas]

Actually what about the theory that china developed too early?

It filled up with people too fast, before the technological productive uses could be found for the surplus labour. Being on the technological edge while growning fast made a mathusian trap while europe had the luck of a big plague, a whole continent or 2 to fill up with extra population to avoid malthus in a critical period and enough foreign technology to adopt to build a narcent industry.

Cultural attitudes might matter here: when Zheng He explored it was a huge economic loss for the Ming state as the fleets was charged to explore and find trading partners rather than to plunder and rob. It turned out to be too expensive compared to the cost as the people worth trading with already went to china (arabs, indians and to some extend portugese,the fleet was huge and advanced. (there is also something about the peculiar nature of the ming trading system and vassalage, but I am already making a wall of text.)

Even if Zheng He had discovered America, its doubtful that he would have had the inclination or reason to slaughter/enslave the native populations for profit for the ming emperor.

With cross in hand and goldlust in heart, however, the savage crusader/mercenaries of 16th century europe was culturally prepared for the task of colonialism. I think one should not underestimate this.

First mover disadvantage? Has anyone argued this before?

[iris]

"Europe got nowhere near China in terms of economic development in 1200 or 1600 for that matter. "

Are you kidding? Granted, by 1200 or 1300 it wouldn't be easy to say who was ahead. But by 1600?

China was left in the dust.

It is a mistake for DeLong to use the word "rich" when describing life under the Song. That is, unless rich meant living in squalor until your 30s or *maybe* 40s, when you likely died. Just like in Europe.

[walkingtheline]

This is a decent survey, but it's a political survey. If you want a more nuanced perspective on economic changes at the turn of the century find and read Robert Hart's diaries and familiarize yourself with the railway rights recovery movement in Sichuan. Realize how different a creature Li Hongzhang was from Zeng Guofan (Li's mentor, and the official who actually suppressed the Taiping rebellion -- you're mistaken to give Li Hongzhang the credit for this). Then remember that Li Hongzhang was Yuan Shikai's mentor.

The amount of political and economic change compressed into those thirty-forty years is stunning.

The turn of the century is the point when China starts to have an emerging mercantile class with more international connections and economic interests that come into conflict with the established political order. This class plays a key role in toppling the Qing government (ie. railroad rights recovery, Soong support for Sun Yatsen) but were not broad or strong enough to create a national political coalition to control what remained when the Qing dynasty fell: a loose compact of regional economies.

Don't be distracted by the fact that most histories of this period focus on the Qing court: most foreign writers are relying on English-language diplomatic sources, which rarely concern themselves with local affairs.

[Ari Levine]

Brad,
I'm a Chinese history prof and a longtime reader of your blog. I'm impressed by your ability to synthesize vast amounts of secondary sources into an elegant narrative.

But you clearly don't know enough about developments in the Chinese economy between, say, 1250 and 1800. And you clearly haven't read much of the scholarship on Chinese economic history that's been written in the past ten years.

Many of the questions you're asking here have been answered by scholars who have access to a much wider knowledge base.

A must-read list:
Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. Berkeley: UCalP, 1998.

Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton UP, 2000.

R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000.

[tomas]

What is your source on "china was left in the dust" by 1600?

If we talk historical GDP levels then the uncertainty is rather big and the statistics is properly more accurate in the west (due to a research bias).

If we look at maddisons work (http://www.theworldeconomy.org/publications/worldeconomy/histostats-table08-3.pdf) there is nothing in those numbers to suggest that "china was left behind".

In 1500 according to these statistics China has a GDP per captia comparative to europe (note how the chinese GDP is in very round figures which I think is because the numbers are very rough and i think lowballed).

Between 1500 and 1820 the chinese population grew with a 3,8 times while the european only grew 2,3 times. W. European GDP per capita grows to 1200 $ but the gross gdp level grows at the same pace: around 3,6 times the level in 1500 for both areas. Note that the chinese empire is bigger that western europe and properly has more regional difference that western europe in this periode, since western and south western provinces have traditionally been much poorer in China. In an agrerian economy less population always means higher GDP per capita, but this does not mean that TFP has grown.

Europeans are also getting a "gold/silver rent" in this period for the america´s which says nothing of the actual productivity of the productive base in western europe.

So if we look the numbers china seem to be playing out a mathusian senario, but it isnt really from 1500 to 1820 (or 1750 im sure that if the comparisans was made there it would point even more to equal).

So no, china was not "left in the dust" economically or developmentally in 1600.

[tomas]

Ari, Many many thanks for the lit. references. I have almost finished my thesis (about something completely different) and I would love to get into chinese economic history more deeply.

Post thesis litterature saved!

[anne]

After another thorough reading and going to Jonathan Spence, I could not be more pleased with the history, and think the section is "particularly good." Be pleased, for I will happily make use of the history from here.

[Andrew]

One suggestion, meant seriously, but not nastily: perhaps consider a "read more" link, so that we get the first two paragraphs and can continue if we wish.

[anne]

Ari Levine, thank you.

I know the work of Kenneth Pomeranz but not of R. Bin Wong or Timothy Brook and will look to both this week. From Pomeranz however, I find no jarring difference in hisgtorical analysis with Brad DeLong's summary. What theme do you have in mind? What am I missing in my reading for a theme that is otherwise contradicted in historical analysis with DeLong's theme?

[Scott Martens]

"...Carswell quotes the North China Herald of June 24, 2007..."

A typo, no doubt. The North China Herald only operated form 1850 to 1864, and was succeeded by the North China Daily News, which ran till 1951.

[kharris]

Ask yourself - "What would Brad DeLong do?"

So a student comes to you and says, "I don't think I have enough knowledge to write about snickerdoodles in my economic history of the cookie." What advice would you give that student? Read more? Talk to Bob - Bob is good on snickerdoodles? Outsource?

[anne]

After a lengthy talk about the essay, after considerable praise the suggestion that comes involves the poissibility of a little more of a geographic analysis, the vulnerability of China externally and the continual felt difficulty of maintaining a political unity where the tendency in so complex and vast a land was for a flying apart. The understaning of Chinese history then we agreed, is an understanding of external vulnerability and the impossibility of political-dynastic unity. A little Jared Diamond here is all. Darn, this is nice we are agreed.

[green apron monkey]

I second Anne's thanks. I'll add those to my Amazon wishlist immediately.

I also second the opinion that all Chinese names and cities should be referred to by one standard romanization, as switching back and forth from the British system to pinyin gives me a headache. The only exception I would make is for Hong Kong - referring to it as Xiang Gang may confuse too many western readers.

I'm good on Snickerdoodles. They should be made from leftover pie crust.

[Alan Baumler]

I agree with Ari that this is a nice summary, but the part on the Late Imperial period in particular seems to be based on scholarship that is about 30 years out of date. In addition to the very good books he mentioned you might look at

On currency
China Upside Down
Currency, Society, and Ideologies, 1808-1856
Man-houng Lin

On the reach and power of the Late Imperial state
China Marches West
The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia
Peter C. Perdue

On imperialism and economics

Big Business in China
Sino-Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry, 1890-1930
Sherman Cochran

On the grain trade and state economic policy

State or Merchant
Political Economy and Political Process in 1740s China
Helen Dunstan

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/science/07indu.html?ref=science

In a recent book, "The Great Divergence," [Kenneth] Pomeranz argues that tapping new sources of energy like coal and bringing new land into cultivation, as in the North American colonies, were the productivity advances that pushed the old agrarian economies out of their Malthusian constraints.

[Notice the theme.]

[anne]

Alan Baumler, thank you.

[iris]

I was actually using a graph created by Maddison which plots GDP/capita of China against Western Europe.

By 1600, the GDP/capita of Western Europe was approaching double that of China.

I'm not sure why you'd consider that an "utterly worthless" piece of information. Maddison doesn't seem to think so.

[Sonia]

More analysis of the influence of Confucianism and the importance of social harmony would be helpful here. Also consider the effect on the Chinese economy and culture of the exodus of entreprenurial talent to South East Asia. Finally foot binding handicapped the productive ability of a large number of women.

[Paul J. Reber]

I learned a lot today from this. That makes me happy.

The element that most captures my thoughts is the stagnation for several centuries. There is obviously a lot more of a historical record on the transition from the disadvantaged stagnation (late 19th, early 20th) and this may be critical for forming ideas about the future of China. China's rise now, seemingly as a result of correcting the stagnation, perhaps is less surprising to students of history.

Trying to understand the stagnation, I'm captured by the idea of too much, too early success. Pressure to advance would have to come from within. Were the people too happy to revolt effectively? Or were the political/bureaucratic structures too effective at quelling revolts?

I don't know if it's possible, but could the number/frequency/size of "peasant rebellions" be quantified across the millenium in China (or elsewhere for comparison)? If they were infrequent, I'm intrigued by the idea that perhaps the population had come to believe that 1500 calories/day and a 40-yr life span was all that was possible.

On the side of a central government structure inhibiting growth, an alternate history to consider might be what would have happened if the Catholic Church had been more effective in medieval Europe. There was certainly a desire to restrain technological growth centrally, but it was insufficiently effective at stopping the Renaissance. Is there a case to be made that in Europe, Catholicism lost to technology, which then broke it (Protestantism). But Confucianism "won" it's battle with technology, leading to centuries of stable stagnation in China.

Now I wish I knew more about India. And SW Asia and the trajectory of the Persian/Muslim/Ottoman Empires.

[Tomas]

I looked up Madison’s figures here: http://www.ggdc.net/Maddison/

According to his estimate by 1600 the western European average was 890 $ and for china it was 600$. Its only in 1820 that western Europe is double that of China.

But Maddison argues in reverse. To get the Chinese per capita numbers he assumes that Ming and Qing china were stagnant in terms of BNP per capita and from this assumption and the population numbers from historical sources he develops Chinese GDP over the long run.

But as I am sure he would agree, the GDP per capita number is just a quantification of this stagnation assumption. To argue that china was stagnating because Maddison says GDP per capita was stagnant is thus circular.

He arrives at the Song baseline of 600 by assuming Han china was about at the same level as the roman empire and argues that the Song economic revolution boost the Chinese from the roman 450 baseline to 600.

I think population figures are much more telling for the period 1500 to 1820 than the GDP per capita numbers for China. (3,6 times higher for China in 1820 and only 2,3 times for Western Europe)

The technical and economic stagnation of China in Ming and Qing is based on the assumption that these were very conservative and closed societies that did not trade much (Madison “Chinese Economic Performance in the Long-Run” 1998).

This narrative of especially Ming china has been challenged in later years. From my rather feeble knowledge of the subject, Ming china did not really close with the end of Zheng He´s expeditions. It was more like the ending of the Apollo program in that the expenses outgrew the usefulness of the exploration.

While I think Madison’s work is very useful and that quantification of historical economic development is an important work, I think the world historical narrative that is the basis for the figures is a bit too Euro-centric.

I am sure some of our resident China experts can do much better than me in discussing this.

[PSP]

I enjoyed reading that.

Please don't replace Tientsin with Tianjin and Canton with Guangzhou. Canton symbolizes centuries of trade, the Peabody-Essex museum, the Met and Wintertur. Canton was a part of American as well as Chinese history. To this reader, at least, Tientsin immediately brings to mind certain historical events and a bad Charlton Heston movie. Guangzhou and Tianjin are meaningless, and a non-expert will not associate the words with much of anything.

A nit pik about tenses:

"Tang Dynasty cavalry has skirmished with Persians on the shores of the Aral Sea."

[no-one]

Suggestions:

(i) Pinyin, please.
(ii) Less emphasis on Confucian ideology. The idea that we can pin any causal effect on the Confucian ideology is *very* dodgy indeed. I could go on about this at length, but as it stands I think you are wallowing in prejudice.
(iii) It is worth thinking about the fact that fundamentally, the Chinese state had always operated to defend a prosperous interior in the south and east from rampaging barbarians to the north and west. During the Qing dynasty, the advent of horse artillery made the north-west frontier evaporate.
(iv) If you are going to specifically mention minor details like the Kaiping mines, you should really include the inflationary effects of Spanish silver on the Chinese economy. I can't remember the details, but I think had a major effect during the early modern period.

[anne]

No-one:

"Less emphasis on Confucian ideology. The idea that we can pin any causal effect on the Confucian ideology is *very* dodgy indeed."

Please expand on this interesting conclusion.

[Theobald Smith]

PSP: Putting "Guangzhou" and "Tianjin" allows the interested student to find these cities on a map, as well as connecting these historical events to real, actual cities they might hear about on the news.

I argue that "Canton" and "Tientsin" are meaningless to the average undergrad, especially one without a background in art history. Consistency is vital.

[Jim]

I am not sure that your statement that Hangzhou was the largest, most populous city in the world in 1100 is accurate given what I read in the Chronicle today, viz.

The medieval Khmer city of Angkor in Cambodia was the largest preindustrial metropolis in the world, with a population of nearly 1 million and an urban sprawl that stretched over an area similar to modern-day Los Angeles, researchers reported Monday.

The city's spread over an area of more than 115 square miles was made possible by a sophisticated technology for managing and harvesting water for use during the dry season - including diverting a major river through the heart of the city.

But that reliance on water led to the city's collapse in the 1500s as overpopulation and deforestation filled the canals with sediment, overwhelming the city's ability to maintain the system, according to the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[shah8]

Metropolis and city are two different things, Jim.

If you wanted to do *metropolis*, then Lake Mexica is probably the largest from around that time...

[shah8]

oops, didn't see 1100, thought it was 1500...

[iris]

I guess the graph has somewhat different data points.

Looking at the log graph, by 1820 China's GDP/capita had been in decline fo 20 years ($600) where Western Europe had accelerated to $1500.

In 1600, it looks like China at $700 and Western Europe at $1100. But wouldn't this make sense since the scientific revolution was well underway in Western Europe and bsent in China?

[chris]

Oh, goody, I get a chance to correct Brad De Long. Isn't the internet wonderful?

No, Brad, you idiot, not Ginseng (which isn't effective against constipation, and which the English didn't much take to) but Rhubarb (is and did).

"The imperial commissioner, Lin Zexu, who was sent to Canton in 1839 to put an end to the opium trade wrote a letter to Queen Victoria pointing to the "fact" that the foreign barbarians surely would die if they could not obtain tea and rhubarb from China and that the Queen for this reason should stop the wicked British merchants from trading with opium. Victoria seems never to have had the letter translated and read for her, and when Lin Zexu later the same year wrote to the British merchants in Canton telling them that a stop to the rhubarb trade would mean the death for the pitiful foreigners, the pitiful foreigners responded with gunboats. Should maybe the Opium War really be called the Rhubarb War?"
http://www.rhubarbinfo.com/rhubarb-history.html

I have to say that it still sounds a bit dodgy and I'd like to check the actual letter, but in any case it'd be even more dodgy with ginseng.

[Tomas]

1600 would be the beginning of the scientific revolution, but I wouldnt say that mattered alot.

The science invented/discovered had almost no practical application until the industrial revolution (actually properly didnt even have much effect before the second industrial revolution). The pre-industrial economy was built on trade, agriculture and handicrafts (plus weapon manufacturing). None of these were helped by science before the middel of the 19th century. Newtonian mechanics were mostly useful for ballistics and for navigation it proberly didnt matter much (if navigators even knew about it before 1700).

What matters is merchant capitalism, which combined with colonialism was the source of much newfound wealth in europe.

I would like to get a link or reference to the capita numbers you are using. I think it will be the same method as Madison use, where the argument is "we know china stagnated, we know han china was similar to the roman empire in economic performance, we give china a boost from song and then let it be stable".

What I am saying is that modern economic history of china seems to show that these assumptions about Ming and Qing china is wrong. If they are wrong then GDP per capita estimates derived from such assumption are also wrong.

[Julian Elson]

"The disregard for human life permits cheap mining by economy in timber [supports].... The aggrieved relatives are amply compensated by... $30 per man.... cases have been proved of suicide for that amount..."

To clarify: was Hoover being an genuine mustache-twirling villain here, or was he being subtly critical of the low safety standards of the mining operation?

[Critical.]

[iris]

"1600 would be the beginning of the scientific revolution, but I wouldnt say that mattered alot."

Copernicus published around 1540, and technological insights in the 1500s mattered a great deal.

[tomas]

To what practical end might I ask?

They matter a great deal in science, but what economic significance did that fact that the earth revolves around the sun have?

Breakthroughs in chemistry came much later and engineering was hardly affected at all.

The economically significant inventions for the early merchant capitalisme were almost all based on craftsmens skills or earlier chinese inventions. The printing press, Gunpowder, The compass (might have been independently invented rather later than in china), Paper are all chinese. Wether the europeans invented them without knowledge of the chinese inventions is besides the point: these inventions didnt NEED modern science.

The scientific revolution is important in retrospect because we can look back from the world of, say, 1900 and see the great importance economic importance for that world of this development. For the relative performance of comtemporary europe it didnt matter one bit.

[iris]

Movable type was invented in China earlier, but the Guttenburg printing press along with the alphabet allowed far more proliferation of books and therefore ideas in Europe.

New techniques in metallurgy expanded, ships became stronger, travel more efficient, agriculture more diverse.

There is no simple reason to why Western Europe started to clearly outstrip China by 1600 -- economics, politics and science all played a role.

(By the start of the industrial revolution, GDP/capita in Western Europe was already 2.5 times higher than China.)

[Twofish]

This is an interesting and useful statement of the "conventional wisdom" on Chinese history circa 1970. The trouble with it is that I don't think that any historian of China would take this version of history seriously today.

The main issue is that empirically, it is very hard to argue that China was economically stagnated circa 1750.

[Iron production per capita circa 1800 appears to have half that of the Sung epoch. Agricultural output per capita appears to have been about 2/3 that of the Sung epoch. Twenty million people did not join the Taiping for no *reason.*

If you want to call that "progress", I suppose you can. I'm searching for a different word...
See the works of Kenneth Pommeranz, Benjamin Elman, and R Bin Wong for sources on this. China underwent a massive commerical revolution in the 17th and 18th centuries, and as of 1750, standards of living where roughly comparable to Europe.

Also, I think that people are much too hard on the Self-Strengthening Movement. It looks bad now because China lost the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, but the negative attitudes toward Self-Strengthening misses the fact that China underwent a lot of industrialization.

Finally, it all depends on your level of comparison. The reasonable comparision for Qing China is the Ottoman Empire and China comes across looking very well there.

[Twofish]

One other problem with the story of "weak China" is that this supposed weak and destitute nation managed to double its land area in Inner Asia in the late 18th and early 19th century.

One problem with history is that people tend to not ask the question, "who is telling the history" and "why are they telling history they way that they are telling it". A lot of the anti-Qing and anti-Manchu histories were taught by the revolutionaries who overthrew the Qing, and things look very different when you see things from the other side.

[Twofish]

The other problem with talking about "Confucian ideology" is what do you mean by "Confucian ideology." In the 19th century, there were a lot of different and conflicting schools of philosophy.

One of the major conflicts was between the "Han learning" school and the "Song learning" school. I have the suspicion is that the idea that "China declined after the Song" is a Western retelling of the "Han learning" view of history.

The "Han learning" school believed that Chinese philosophy had been hopelessly corrupted by Buddhism and was interested in reconstructing the ancient classics through scholarship. Curiously, the Han learning school was very pro-Western science, as they believed that the West had merely taken ideas that where invented in China eons ago, and refined them. This view of things was very popular until the the Sino-Japanese War. The trouble is that people could argue that the West had merely refined Chinese knowledge because people didn't know that much about the West. You couldn't make this argument about the Japanese, which is why the Sino-Japanese War was such a shock.

(citation: Benjamin Elman)

Also, saying good things about the Han and saying bad things about the Ming dynasty was a politically safe thing to do in 19th century China. Saying lots of good things about the Ming would have gotten you in a great deal of political trouble, and I think that a lot of the anti-Ming views that come through in history are influenced by that.

People's views of history are influenced by their current surrounding, and I'm very pro-Qing dynasty, because the Qing were in the end able to take a bunch of people that had little in common and forge a nation from it. The idea of a nation is one that naturally forms, they are constructed, and the idea of "China" was formed in large part by the Qing.

Also, as a Chinese-American in the American economic and academic elite, I find the writings of the Qing about how they managed to be a "minority elite" and how they managed to mix Manchu and Chinese identities to be very useful in my situation.

[Twofish]

Actually the reason that industrialization didn't spread in China-19th century is easy to explain. In the early 21st century, we are witnessing a massive worldwide de-industrialization, as capital-intensive industries are being replaced by labor-intensive ones in China.

Look at your shirt. Chances are that it wasn't made in a factory in the Midlands and New England, but rather by hand in China. The reason for this is that China has a lot of people, and this population boom started in the late-1600's.

[anne]

Twofish:

When time permits, please continue your important argument-critique.

[James Wimberley]

Brad uses a similar argument to Jared Diamond's theory that the military and technological superiority of conquistadors over Aztecs and Incas was in part the result of European political divisions, which fostered military innovation.
You could try a parallel argument about trade and the rule of law. In divided mediaeval Europe, trade centrally involved foreigners: Flemish wool-merchants in London, Jews, Venetians, Genoese, Pisans... As the Counts of Champagne realised in the twelfth century, long-distance trade required fair courts to enforce contracts, sometimes in favour of foreigners against compatriots. Hence the growth of a respected body of commercial law.

As I understand it, Confucianism is and remains hostile to law, and contracts are basically enforced by social pressures - which only works between compatriots (or coreligionists, in the case of the Arab caliphate.) Large-scale capitalism, like international trade, presupposes the rule of law, which China never developed. (This explanation has a hard time with China's current capitalist, law-free boom.)

Only a piece of the puzzle, but worth a look.

[Ian Whitchurch]

Tomas misses the two most important areas that European science gave Europeans dominance over other cultures by 1520 or so.

European artillery and fortresses combined to give Europe effective naval supremacy over everyone else.

Both of these rely on geometry, and once you have a modern geometrical Italian fortress on the coast supplied by artillery-equipped roundships, then there is absolutely nothing that another culture can do to shift it. Sieges wont work, as they are resupplied by sea, and you just can't (*) assault a modern fortress with interlocking fields of artillery and handgun fire.

Yup, the Eurpoeans cant venture inland from their fortress ... but their floating artillery platforms have a decisive advantage against enemy fleets, whether pirates or unfriendly states.

Thus, Europeans dominate the trade routes, extracting the surplus from, say, the cloth-spices-rice triangle trade between India, China and the Spice Islands.

Ian Whitchurch

(*) OK, the assault by the striking Spanish Army on the fortress at Antwerp held by the Spanish government is the exception that proves the rule.

[piotr]

In the period 1500-1800 Western Europe had increasing income per capita and China did not. One reason is that in pre-industrial economy per-capita income is largely determined by the mass of peasantry.

One aspect is that it was much easier to obtain high efficiency of agricultural labor if the land was plentiful. Basically, there was a trade-off between productivity of land (higher in China) and productivity of labor (higher in Europe).

The second aspect is that China was a more-or-less complete economic system, while Western Europe was not. If you add countries supplying Western Europe with products of agriculture and forestry, the comparison will look quite differently. In particular, northern Italy, Low Countries and Britain correspond to the most industrial and mercantile regions of China rather than China as a whole, while Eastern Europe, Ottoman Empire and Latin America would correspond to the more backward regions.

The political independence of the mercantile core of Europe (which became the mercantile core of Europe, Americas and Mediterranean, partly due to the river of silver percolating from Spanish Empire to the rest of the system through the mercantile core) can be contrasted with the unchallenged imperial administration of China. In Europe, merchants who had industrial interests were the ruling class (in places where they could pursue those interests), in China, they had no political influence whatsoever. At some point it started to matter.

I guess that if the Dutch rebelion against the Spanish kings was defeated, Great Armada augmented by the loyal Dutch subjects would bring England to heel and Habsburgs could be functional counterparts of Qin dynasty --- leaders of immense bureaucracy stiffling the most disturbing of the innovations. But Europe had complex geography, multitude of languages was no tradition of universal benevolent administration.

[Tomas]

Iris, you havent answered why you put so much faith in GDP per capita numbers.

Its not like there was a statistical bureau that kept track of economic activity in China (or indeed western europe) in the year 1600.

These numbers are a way of telling a story, not hard data on the economic situation.

The story the GDP per capita numbers tell is based on some assumptions about China in Qing and Ming, namely that they were static.

Modern histories of china are increasingly challenging this idea, which renders the GDP per capita calculations wrong.

[John Faughnan]

You should probably listen to the "Needham question" programme of In Our Time.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime_20061019.shtml

[ajg]

Comparing W.Europe with all of China is misleading - including all of Europe is slightly better.
An excellent, easy, and slick resource for those interested in comparative history and E.Asia:
http://afe.easia.columbia.edu/chinawh/

[Twofish]

I'm a bit skeptical of any mono-casual explanation of "Why China didn't industrialize?" I'm find it more enlightening in questioning the question (Are we sure that China didn't industralize? What do we mean by industrialize? What do we mean by "China"? Why do we care that China didn't industrialize?)

One thing that historians need to be careful about is "circular reasoning." China didn't industrialize because of the dead weight of Confucian stifiling bureauracy. How do we know that China had a stifiling bureaucracy? Well it must have otherwise it would have growth economically. How do we know that it didn't grow economically, well it couldn't have because of the stifilling bureaucracy.

ARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

The trouble here is making extrapolations based on what should have happened is easy. Digging into complex history to find out what did happen is hard.

I'm particularly skeptical about two pieces of "evidence"

Evidence by absence - China had X, Europe didn't have X, or vice versa. The trouble here is that is the real issue here, that you didn't really look hard enough for X.

Evidence by sound bite - The problem here is that you can take an isolated quote from just about anyone and prove just about anything. There are lots of examples of people with nice quotes and incidents that attempt to prove a vast generalization. Usually what happens if you dig into the evidence, you find a far more complex situation.

What makes it complex is that different people have different attitudes. What do Americans in the 20th century think about science? It depends on the American and the time you choose, and if you pick a small number of quotes, you can prove anything you want. At that point the really interesting question is "what do you want to prove?"

The other interesting thing is how certain individual quotes are copied over and over. There is the letter from Qianlong to Lord MacCartney, the letters of Lin Zexu, and the Zheng He voyages. What is actually the case when people are using the same quotes is that they are copying history from each other.

[Twofish]

One set of books that is useful is Kenneth Pommeranz's The Great Divergence. In the book, Pommeranz systematically goes through each of the traditional reasons why China didn't develop, and argues that they are factually suspect.

GDP and income - China and Europe in 1750 were comparable
population - comparable
system of commercial law - China had a very well developed system of law
government expropriation of merchant revenue - no worse in China than Europe

Pommeranz concludes that the basic reason for the divergence was that North America provided resource inputs and an outlet for European emmigration, that avoided a cycle in which economic improvment just increased population.

Here is a link that summarizes the current scholarship on China....

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/10/114.html

[anne]

Among the fine comments, notice Ian Whitchurch:

"European science gave Europeans dominance over other cultures by 1520 or so.

"European artillery and fortresses combined to give Europe effective naval supremacy over everyone else.

"Both of these rely on geometry, and once you have a modern geometrical Italian fortress on the coast supplied by artillery-equipped roundships, then there is absolutely nothing that another culture can do to shift it."

The argument corresponds perfectly to what we know of the development of art history. Nice done, Ian.

[anne]

Thank you, Twofish. I am quite sympathetic to your reading, and am thinking futher along your lines.

A host of fine comments to think through, which should please Brad DeLong, because there should be the result of such a conjectural analysis.

Nice.

[iris]

Yes, I relize there was no bureau to keep track of GDP/capita in the 1600s. But I think it is a bit odd that you both use Maddison and then claim his GDP/capita estimtes are "utterly worthless" (orginal post with respect to all pre-industril GDP figures)

[JonF]

Re: That is, unless rich meant living in squalor until your 30s or *maybe* 40s, when you likely died. Just like in Europe.

In neither Europe nor China did people commonly up and die in their 30s and 40s. Those low life expectancy figures are an artifact of horrific childhood mortality (at least 1 in 3 children died in good times; in bad times the number might be double that and this was true even among the upper classes). Those who survived to adulthood were winners in a purely Darwinian sense: they had superior immune systems and hence, unless in the path of natural disaster or war, they might reasonably hope to live out the three score and ten years that even antiquity (e.g., the Bible) saw as the natural span of human life.

Re: On the side of a central government structure inhibiting growth, an alternate history to consider might be what would have happened if the Catholic Church had been more effective in medieval Europe.

Far from seeking to restrain technology the Catholic Church was its enabler (don't be misled by the brief fracas over Galileo which had as much to do with Church and Italian politics as it did with science and theology). During the early Middle Ages the Benedictine monasteries were centers of innovation for both handicrafts and agriculture; the fact that monks did not have to concern themselves with feeding children freed up their working capital for other purposes. It was also churchmen (Roger Bacon, William of Okham, Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and in the East Michael Psellus) who were responsible for the revival of classical knowledge later in the Middle Ages. The Church was a net plus to Europe: unlike the Hindu Brahmins or China's Confucian mandarins the Church was not beholden to any secular power and so possessed a unique freedom.

[Twofish]

anne: The problem with the explanation of European scientific advantage is that advances in European geometry diffused into China very quickly. The Jesuits were employed by both the Ming and Qing Imperial court to forge cannon.

There is a recent exhibition of Chinese art and one of the illustrations showed how perspective was adopted by Chinese painters in the 17th century. Once again to argue that Europe had X and China didn't have X, you need to show that China didn't have X.

The big problem with sea fortification wasn't that China didn't have the knowledge to build effective fortifications, it was that there wasn't much point in doing so. Imagine making the case to the Emperor circa 1750 that he should be spending more money on sea fortifications, at the same time he is spending a huge amount of money fighting some major campaigns in inner Asia.

[Twofish]

1) Something else to point out is that a lot of British views toward China (and India and the Middle East) in the mid-19th century were intended to justify British colonialism. China and India and the Middle East were civilizations with great and glorious pasts that had become stagnant, and it was the "white man's burden" to lead these civilizations out of their stagnation.

2) Related to this is that the recent economic scholarship suggests that China was not in a Malthusian crisis in the 19th century...

google for "One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian mythology and Chinese realities"

[piotr]

jonF: does strong centralized state foster, or stiffle technological progress?

My claim is that it fosters self-limiting progress. Superior technologies that China had in making cast iron or high quality ceramics were quite possibly related to the existence of state monopolies. The problem is: can the progress continue without deeply destabilizing social changes that a rational administration would prevent?

One thing that such an administration would try to assure is that various classes "know their place" and are properly regulated. And "industrial revolution" is indeed a revolution. The Dutch had to secede from Habsburgh empire (far-flang collection of posession somewhat overlapping with Roman Empire of German Nation) to thrive. Northern Italy was not so lucky.

By the way, what advances lead to "modern geometry"? Axioms of Euclides? I say, people who build pyramids were competent enough to build a 16 century fortress. Romans definitely were -- Hadrian Tomb, a.k.a. Castle San Angelo, was one of the finest fortresses for a very long time. Romans were building very fine port facilities. Perhaps we should say that the development of modern 17-18 century palisade cemented superiority of Europeans over natives of North America.

[Tomas]

Well, "utterly useless" might have been an overstatement. But what I said was that per capita measurements of income are not a good measure for the relative economic performance of pre-industrial societies. If you have two nations where one (lets call it china) has a fast population growth and stable per capita income and one (lets call it Ireland) has a falling population and stable GDP per capita, which economy is performing better. According to you its a wash.

Also I argue that the GDP per capita number are properly wrong because they are based on a wrong interpretation of history. Madisons GDP/capita figures are constructed from a interpretation of history. You cant use those numbers as proof that "europe left china in the dust by 1200". BTW 1200 is the Song period in china, so I highly doubt that anything in europe could compare with the proto-industrial (coal using, steelmaking) Song.

I used madisons numbers to show that even on your own premises, there was nothing in those numbers to support that statement.

[anne]

Twofish:

"The problem with the explanation of European scientific advantage is that advances in European geometry diffused into China very quickly. The Jesuits were employed by both the Ming and Qing Imperial court to forge cannon.

"There is a recent exhibition of Chinese art and one of the illustrations showed how perspective was adopted by Chinese painters in the 17th century. Once again to argue that Europe had X and China didn't have X, you need to show that China didn't have X."

Agreed on both points, as I clearly and interestingly find looking to Chinese art history. I realize how quickly western perspective developments were integrated in Chinese drafting though Chinese traditional perspective techniques sre retained as would be expected.

Possibly then only with Cezanne is there as understanding among artists of what the Chinese were traditionally able to show.

[anne]

Twofish:

"Something else to point out is that a lot of British views toward China (and India and the Middle East) in the mid-19th century were intended to justify British colonialism. China and India and the Middle East were civilizations with great and glorious pasts that had become stagnant, and it was the 'white man's burden' to lead these civilizations out of their stagnation."

Agreed again; but we still need to ask why European colonialism was relatively successful in China or India. Here, I want to think through Jared Diamond again.

[anne]

My approach to Chinese history has been art history, and in looking through my books of prints I realize newly that western technical advance becomes quickly part of Chinese art-architecture.

[Tomas]

European Colonialism was succesful in India, but not in China per say.

Colonialism implies political control of a area or region. That why we can say that africa was really colonized in a broad sense before mid-late 19th century.

European naval and military supremacy was just used in an agressive way to promote economic interest. The trade ports and such does not make china a colony of any european nation. Indeed the second opium war a multinational action from most of the developed world at the time.

I think in terms of Diamond, his thesis fits better on the conquest of america than on the relations within the euro-asian continent.

[Twofish]

jonF: does strong centralized state foster, or stiffle technological progress?

My claim is that this question is far too vague to come up with an answer other than "it depends." Almost immediately you run into problems of definition. What is a "strong centralized state" and what is "technological progress"? Also applying those definitions to actual cases is tough.

Was China circa-1700 a "strong centralized state"? What about China-today or the United States-today? How much "technological progress" was there in each of those situations?

The trouble with these vague definitions is that you can basically argue whatever answer you want, and you don't get any insight at all. You can rephrase the question slightly. Do states with high taxation rates have higher agricultural mechanization? However, even when you do this, the answer usually turns out to be "it depends" but the good thing is that if you ask a precise question, you can also ask "what does it depend on?"

This might seem to be a semantic game, but there are really high stakes involved here. One problem with academics is that they often are unwilling and unable to say "I just don't know" and it's not what you don't know that kills you, it's what you know that isn't.

[Twofish]

Something that one has to be aware of is that sometimes things happen in history because of random accident and small events. This is important to realize because then one realizes that people matter. This is a very scary thought because then one realizes that what *you* do matters.

Change a very few things, and China ends up looking like the Middle East with a patchwork of states, and the Middle East ends up looking like China with a single unified "Ottoman" state.

One very interesting what-if is what if instead of the Manchus invading China in 1644, Oba Norabuga, the Japanese warlord, succeeded in conquering Ming China. In this case "China" would not be a continental empire expanding into central Asia, but rather a maritime empire expanding southward into the Philiphines and Indonesia.

One thing that does come up once you look at it is that China and the West have been trading ideas back and forth since the 1600's, and this ends up showing up in some very strange ways.

For example, Lionel Jensen has written a fascinating book "Manufacturing Confucianism" in which he argues that the idea of "Confucius" as a sage scholar and "Confucianism" as a coherent ideology was actually largely invented by the Jesuits. One sign of this is shows up if you ask yourself the question, "Why does a Chinese philosopher have a Latin name?"

[anne]

Thank you, Thomas and Twofish.

The conjecture of China expanding by sea rather than by land, along with the difference in weatern colonizing of India as opposed to manipulating Chinese politics helps me better understand the geographical possibilities involved in the 2 continental sized countires.