The Micro Economics Of Peasant Economy China 1920 1940

The objectives of this study, first published in 1982, are to elaborate a micro-economic model which adequately explains the interrelationships among economic forces determining the distribution of income in a peasant economy in the early stages of transition to industrialization. It also examines the development of the ‘dual economy’, an economy composed of a large peasant agricultural sector with its ancillary handicraft sector, both traditional in techniques and institutions, and a small but growing modern industrial sector.

The author presents a convincing new interpretation of the origins and nature of the agrarian crisis that gripped the North China Plain in the two centuries before the Revolution. His extensive research included eighteenth-century homicide case records, a nineteenth-century country government archive, large quantities of 1930's Japanese ethnographic materials, and his own field studies in 1980. Through a comparison of the histories of small family farms and larger scale managerial farms, the author documents and illustrates the long-term trends of agricultural commercialization, social stratification, and mounting population pressure in the peasant economy. He shows how those changes, in the absence of dynamic economic growth, combined over the course of several centuries to produce a majority, not simply of land-short peasants or of exploited tenants and agricultural laborers, but of poor peasants who required both family farming and agricultural wage income to survive. This interlocking of family farming with wage labor furnished a large supply of cheap labor, which in turn acted as a powerful brake of capital accumulation in the economy. The formation of such a poor peasantry ultimately altered both the nature of village communities and their relations with the elites and the state, creating tensions that led in the end to revolution.

Drawing on material previously available only in Chinese, this book provides an assessment of China's recent reform of the foreign trade system and discusses the benefits of such reform in terms of higher growth for its economy.

This book uses a comparative approach to explain why China’s role in the world economy has changed so dramatically in the last thousand years. This edition has been revised and updated and Chapter 4 is new. It concludes that China will resume its role as the world's largest economy by 2015.

This study, first published in 1993, analyses the relationship among poverty, food insecurity and commercialization in rural China by employing agricultural household models. Data are derived from a 10,000 household subsample of the annual rural household consumption and expenditure survey.

Based on solid research, "Jingji Xue" presents how Economics, as a thought as well as an intellectual discipline, had been introduced to China. It identifies the Chinese who studied Economics in the West and evaluates their roles in teaching, research, and publication in China. Particularly, it describes and examines the activities of Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, and Yan Fu et al in transmitting and interpreting Western Economics. The evolution of Economics programme in leading universities in China is also discussed

China's agricultural growth in the past two decades has been called a miracle. An analysis of the sources of this miraculous growth is the focus of the present volume. In addition, this book also investigates the impact of economic reforms on agriculture, the potential of grain production in China, and regional disparities in agricultural production and growth performance. This book adds to the literature and contributes to the current debates on food security and rural development.

John King Fairbank was the West's doyen on China, and this book is the full and final expression of his lifelong engagement with this vast ancient civilization. The distinguished historian Merle Goldman brings the book up to date and provides an epilogue discussing the changes in contemporary China that will shape the nation in the years to come.