The Chinese Economy In The Early Twentieth Century

This concise 1999 introduction focuses on China's transition to economic modernisation.

Views the impact of foreign imperialism on China during its apogee, the early republican era (1910 to 1920)

Views the impact of foreign imperialism on China during its apogee, the early republican era (1910 to 1920)

An economic history of China's last imperial dynasty and through the first half of the 20th century, originally published in The Cambridge History of China, v.11 and v.12, 1980 and 1983 respectively. Feuerwerker (U. of Michigan) summarizes the states of agriculture and industry in the Ch'ing Empire, and economic trends in the Republic, including fo

China's extraordinary rise as an economic powerhouse in the past two decades poses a challenge to many long-held assumptions about the relationship between political institutions and economic development. Economic prosperity also was vitally important to the longevity of the Chinese Empire throughout the preindustrial era. Before the eighteenth century, China's economy shared some of the features, such as highly productive agriculture and sophisticated markets, found in the most advanced regions of Europe. But in many respects, from the central importance of irrigated rice farming to family structure, property rights, the status of merchants, the monetary system, and the imperial state's fiscal and economic policies, China's preindustrial economy diverged from the Western path of development. In this comprehensive but accessible study, Richard von Glahn examines the institutional foundations, continuities and discontinuities in China's economic development over three millennia, from the Bronze Age to the early twentieth century.

Why did it take China more than a century after its defeat in the first Opium War to begin systematically acquiring the fruits of modern technology? To what extent did the rapid economic developments after 1949 depend on features unique to China and to Chinese history as well as on the socialist reorganization of society? These are the major questions examined in this collection of papers which challenges many previously accepted generalizations about the nature and extent of advances in China's economy during the twentieth century. The papers discuss the positive and negative effects of foreign imperialism on Chinese economic development, the adequacy of China's financial resources for major economic initiatives, the state of science and technology in late traditional China, the changing structure of national product and distribution of income, the cotton textile and small machine-building industries as examples of pre-1949 economic bases, the village-market town structure of rural China, the tradition of cooperative efforts in agriculture, and the influence of the Yenan period on the economic thinking of China's leaders.