Daniel Little
University of Michigan-Dearborn
China’s rural economy was extremely poor;
it was stagnant or even declining in per capita terms; and it embodied
substantial inequalities of land, tenancy and security—or so conventional
wisdom would have it. R.H.
Tawney’s bleak observations in the 1930s set the stage for much work on the
economic history of the late imperial period in the 1960s and 1970s. Tawney emphasizes extortionate taxation
and credit relations, warlordism, minute landholdings, poor soils, and
population pressure as the chief causes of increasing rural misery in
China. He wrote, “There is even
some reason to believe that, with the increased pressure on the land caused by
the growth of population, the condition of the rural population, in some parts
of China, may be actually worse than it was two centuries ago . . . . It is difficult to resist the
conclusion that a large proportion of Chinese peasants are constantly on the
brink of actual destitution” ((Tawney 1966) : 71-72).
Western scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s emphasized the poverty and
stagnancy of the Chinese rural economy, thus confirming the broad outlines of
Tawney’s analysis. And this
interpretation of Republican China echoes the Malthusian and Smithian
interpretations of China’s rural economy in the early-modern period
(1600-1850), according to which population growth, limited resources, and
stagnant technology doomed rural Chinese people to low and falling standards of
living.
However, in the 1990s several important
bodies of scholarship have challenged this conventional wisdom. Treating the last decades of the
nineteenth century and the first thirty years of the twentieth century, Thomas
Rawski (Rawski 1989) and Loren Brandt (Brandt 1989) argue for a substantial degree of growth in
agricultural output, rural incomes and living standards. And in their important treatments of
the longer duration of Chinese economic development, Kenneth Pomeranz (Pomeranz 2000) and R. Bin Wong (Wong 1997) argue that early-modern Chinese agriculture was
roughly as productive in 1700 as that of its contemporary European farming, and
that the standard of living in the countryside was comparable in China and
England. Further, James Lee and
his collaborators (Lee and Campbell 1997; Bengtsson and al 2004; Lee and
Feng 1999) have challenged the Malthusian interpretation of Chinese historical
demography. They argue that
China’s population history shows moderate growth and socially regulated rates
of fertility—thus contradicting the idea that population growth made
modern economic growth impossible to achieve in China.
These more favorable views of the economic
potential of early modern China have stimulated a vigorous debate. Against Pomeranz, Philip Huang (Huang 1990) argues that the rice economy of the Yangzi Delta was
locked in a pattern of “involutionary growth” with little or no improvement in
per capita output and living standards and a pattern of declining labor
productivity. In a major critique
of Pomeranz’s interpretation, Huang (Huang 2002) and Brenner and Isett (Brenner and Isett 2002) offer fundamental and sweeping criticisms of the
empirical and theoretical case that Pomeranz advances; Pomeranz responds
forcefully and at length in the same journal (Pomeranz 2002), and James Lee and his colleagues rebut the
demographic assumptions made by Huang (Lee, Campbell, and Feng 2002).
Highly relevant to both debates is Bozhong
Li’s extensive body of work on agricultural inputs, outputs, costs, and rents
in the family farm economy of the lower Yangzi Delta. Li provides a crucial empirical basis for assessing the
claims in these debates (Li 1998). Li
provides for the Jiangnan region of China a body of empirical assessment that
is comparable to the impact of the work of Robert Allen on the productivity of
the English farm economy (Allen 2005). These
bodies of research permit evidence-based estimates of the standard of living in
England and Jiangnan that provide the basis for some conclusions about
involution, growth, or stagnation in these rural economies, especially in the
early modern period.
These disagreements raise a number of
important issues for China scholars more broadly: the nature and rate of
agricultural development (output, productivity and application of new
technologies), the direction and nature of change in rural welfare during the
period, and the character and pace of social change during this period (rural
to urban migration, land tenure change, concentration of landholdings). If the generally upbeat assessment
offered by Rawski and Brandt is sustained, then a rather deep reassessment will
be needed of the status of welfare and social change in China’s countryside in
the early twentieth century. If
Huang’s view is validated, then customary assumptions about the nature of
economic development in an agrarian economy need rethinking.
This essay focuses on these important
dimensions of disagreement in the literature today about economic change in
the Qing and early Republican period.
The substantive issues may be summarized along the following lines. First are issues directly concerned
with processes of development within the agricultural sector. Was there significant productivity
growth in Chinese agriculture during the period? Were there significant processes of technological change
under way? Was commercialization
stimulating greater efficiency and investment? To what extent did new communication and transportation
technologies stimulate change in the rural sector? Second, each author is forced to arrive at assessments of
China’s population trends during the period; and there is significant
controversy about China’s historical demography. What is the best estimate of the rate of increase of the
population? How much urban
migration or inter-rural migration was occurring? How significant were large “positive checks” such as famine,
disease, and warfare in China’s population history? Third is the question of the status of structural economic
transformation of the Chinese economy in the Republican period. To what extent was the proportion of
agriculture to manufacturing and handicraft output changing during this period? How much growth of manufacturing and
industrial employment was occurring?
How extensive was the growth of commercialization of agriculture? How rapidly was modern industry eroding
traditional manufacturing?
Finally, there are a host of issues relating to the net effects of these
various processes on the welfare of the rural population. What was happening to rents and
wages? Was population pressure on
resources placing increasing strain on the rural economy? Were rural incomes subject to greater
instability? Are there available
data that would indicate the direction of change of nutritional adequacy in the
rural population? To put it
crudely: was the rural population in a state of immiseration during the
period? Was it holding its
own? Or was there significant, if
slow, improvement in rural welfare?
It is evident that there is a very wide
range of disagreement across these several schools of thought on China’s rural
economy. The disagreements between
Pomeranz and Huang, or Brandt and Lippit, are not over minor points of
empirical detail; they involve fundamentally differing assessments of the
overall nature and direction of Chinese economic change in the relevant
periods. Moreover, these disagreements
matter a great deal to our understanding of China’s development in the
twentieth century. To what extent
is it possible to resolve these issues?
What obstacles stand in the way of our reaching relatively definitive
conclusions on these central economic issues? How much resolution is it possible to reach concerning the
main economic characteristics of the Chinese rural economy?
Let
us begin by considering the “involution debate” between Pomeranz and Huang (and
numerous other experts). Eurasian
economic history has been dominated in the past several years by a sustained
debate over the developmental status of late imperial China relative to
England: was the early modern Chinese agricultural economy “involutionary,”
“stagnant”, or “revolutionary”? This
section considers the main features of this debate.
The
involution debate involving Pomeranz, Brenner, Huang, Lee, and others has been
heated, complex, and sometimes illuminating ((Huang 2002), (Brenner and Isett 2002), (Pomeranz 2002), (Wong 2003), (Lee, Campbell, and Feng 2002), (Goldstone 2002), (Li 2002b)). The
debate has revolved around several important and somewhat independent
dimensions. There is a core set of
factual disagreements over the status of a number of important variables,
including especially the comparative standard of living and the level of
agricultural productivity. There is also a degree of disagreement over
conceptual issues. How do we
define “sustained economic development”, standard of living, or
productivity? What constitutes a
good causal explanation? And there
is disagreement concerning the causal and institutional factors that might be
thought to have created “stagnation” or involution in Asia.
Philip Huang argues forcefully for the
involutionary nature of China’s rural economy. He maintains that China’s agricultural economy in the late
Qing and early Republican economy experienced extremely low levels of per
capita productivity and was able to increase output only at the expense of
ever-increasing inputs of labor per unit of output (Huang 1990). The
family-farming unit was one that was highly vulnerable to self-exploitation
(the use of “free” family labor well past the point of reasonable marginal
return), and the pressure of limited land, population increase, and
technological stagnation resulted in falling productivity and stagnant to
falling standard of living. According to Huang and his supporters, the Yangzi
Delta was on an involutionary trajectory in the early-modern time period,
involving Malthusian crisis (population exceeding food production), falling
labor productivity, rising intensity of land use, falling marginal product, and
falling living standards.
Huang’s
book covers a very long time horizon; he treats the Yangzi rural economy over a
600-year period, leading through the post-Mao reforms. He maintains that the Yangzi Delta
economy was characterized by a system of subsistence-level farming based on
peasant family production; “only in the 1980s did transformative development
begin to come to the delta countryside, to result in substantial margins above
subsistence in peasant incomes” ((Huang 1990) : 1).
Huang holds that this rural economy was heavily involuted, organized
around self-exploiting family production. The stimulus of population increase led to intensive rather
than productivity-enhancing growth, and the results were stagnant levels of
welfare for the rural population.
The farm family system drove out hired labor managerial farming because
of low opportunity cost of family labor (14). Thus in Huang’s view the farm economy was characterized by
“growth without development” (11).
It was highly involuted due to population pressure and did not show
significant growth in productivity through this whole period. Agricultural output expanded just
enough to keep pace with population increase, largely through intensification
of production. “There was little
or no expansion until the introduction of modern inputs after 1950” ((Huang 1990) : 14).
Finally, Huang rejects Rawski’s and Brandt’s arguments that living
standards were rising appreciably around the turn of the twentieth century
(137-143) (discussed below).
Kenneth
Pomeranz disagrees profoundly with the involutionist interpretation when
applied to the early modern period (1600-1800). In order to provide a more adequate comparative economic
history, he proposes a detailed comparison between England and Jiangnan in the
early stages of the modern period.
Pomeranz maintains, against the involutionists, that China’s rural
economy was roughly as productive as England’s in 1700, and that the rural
standard of living in the lower Yangzi region was approximately the same as
that of rural England in the same period (Pomeranz 2000). “It
seems likely that average incomes in Japan, China, and parts of southeast Asia
were comparable to (or higher than) those in western Europe even in the late
eighteenth century” ((Pomeranz 2000) : 49).
Pomeranz holds that Huang gives too little attention to the importance
of the differences betweens land-intensive and labor-intensive
agriculture. Pomeranz agrees that
China’s economy did not emerge into a period of sustained modern economic
development following the beginning of the eighteenth century (this is the
significance of his title The Great Divergence); but he contests Huang’s explanation for this fact
(Huang’s argument that involutionary agriculture prevented
productivity-enhancing innovations).
Pomeranz asserts that broad features of Yangzi Delta agricultural
productivity, handicraft productivity, standard of living, and demographic
behavior were generally similar across the two cases, and that economic
“breakthrough” in the English case was the result of a highly contingent,
non-systemic factor—the acquisition of significant natural resources and
labor in the Americas.
There
is an important conceptual point that must be emphasized in considering this
debate. Both “revolution” and
“involution” imply a sustained tendency to change: either dramatically rising
labor-land productivity or gradually falling labor productivity. But there is a third logical alternative:
generally flat productivity in the face of many other changing
variables—new fertilizers, rising population, ecological challenges,
falling land-labor ratios, technological changes, or environmental challenges. (Broadly speaking, this is the view advanced
by Dwight Perkins (Perkins 1969).) This is a coherent and historically defensible position:
that Chinese agriculture was neither leading to revolution, nor was it
experiencing a longterm trend towards involution. It was instead stable and progressive, from the point of
view of labor productivity, per capita output, and farm incomes. But is this position supported by the
facts?
One
thing we can say confidently is that there was substantial intra-regional
diversity in levels and rates of change with respect to defining economic
variables across Eurasia: standard of living, total output, output per capita,
etc. Robert Allen’s research
demonstrates this diversity for Europe; England, Scandinavia, and Italy show
very different profiles of development, real wage, and institutional setting (Allen 2000). But
likewise, it is possible to document a similar range of diversity within China
and across Asia. We can also say confidently
that there were significant regional variations with respect to background
institutions and conditions: political institutions, market institutions,
environment, and social property systems (governing land and labor). This degree of variation should lead us
to expect significant differences in economic history as well across regions.
In
the next several pages we will consider the central areas of disagreement among
the participants in the involution debate: population trends, farm productivity,
the level of the real wage, and the impact of differences in the institutions
governing agriculture.
The
issue of population dynamics is central to this debate. The involutionary interpretation
depends heavily on the Malthusian view that China’s population consistently
showed rates of increase that pushed against the limits of agriculture and
land. However, Pomeranz, Lee, and
Li maintain that the lower Yangzi River basin was not characterized by a Malthusian crisis. Instead, they argue that China’s
demographic regime was stable and resulted in controlled fertility. James Lee and his colleagues maintain
that more detailed study of China’s demographic systems at the level of the
family result in similar demographic outcomes to those experienced in early
modern Europe (Lee and Feng 1999).
The
Eurasian demography project is an approach to historical demography that is
intended to provide a substantially more detailed understanding of the
historical trajectory of demography in different parts of the Eurasian land
mass—population size, nuptiality, fertility, mortality, etc., as well as
a more empirically constrained set of hypotheses about the causes of changes in
these factors over time (Bengtsson and al 2004; Allen, Bengtsson, and Dribe
2005). The authors describe the
project in these terms: “New data and new methods … have begun to illuminate
the complexities of demographic responses to exogenous stress, economic and
otherwise.… Combined time-series and event-history analyses of longitudinal,
nominative, microlevel data now allow for the finely grained differentiation of
mortality, fertility, and other demographic responses by social class,
household context, and other dimensions at the individual level” ((Bengtsson and al 2004) : viii-ix).
Their research is distinguished by several important starting points: It
attempts to combine aggregate and individual levels; it attempts to identify similarities
and differences at both extremes of Eurasia and within Europe and Asia; it
understands the “large-scale processes and implications of the fertility and
mortality transitions”; and it attempts to evaluate the large hypotheses
(especially Malthusianism) concerning differences in demographic regimes
between Europe and Asia.
The
authors find that their results cast doubt on the Malthusian conclusions and
generalizations about positive and negative checks and Europe versus Asia. “Our
project studies how changing economic conditions—food prices and
wages—and different socioeconomic contexts—household, kin, and
class composition—affect individual demographic outcomes. By comparing the patterns of
demographic responses, we can understand better the socially and culturally
conditioned decisions that families and individuals make as they struggle to
cope with changing conditions” (5).
They find that family practices, demographic institutions, and economic
settings vary sufficiently across the map of Eurasia as to make it impossible
to arrive at grand differentiating statements about European and Asian
demography (or English and Chinese demography). In particular, they find that the evidence shows that
Chinese demographic behavior resulted in fertility rates that were broadly
comparable to those of Western Europe.
The
behavior of agricultural productivity is crucial to this debate. How are we to attempt to resolve the
disagreements involved in this debate?
Since there is a substantial range of empirical disagreement between the
two perspectives, it is logical to hope for some degree of resolution through
more detailed factual and empirical research.
Here
the careful empirical work provided by Robert Allen and Bozhong Li is crucial
to the debate. Bozhong Li’s major studies of Jiangnan farming (Li 1998, 2002a) provide much of the empirical base that is used by
other scholars in attempting to arrive at estimates of farm productivity and
rural incomes in the lower Yangzi region.
And Li’s studies contradict the assertion that labor productivity was
declining in the early modern period in the lower Yangzi Delta. According to Li, the Chinese farm
economy experienced steady labor productivity and rising land productivity, resulting
in a level standard of living for rural workers and farmers. Finally, Li and Pomeranz observe that
the two paths (England and Jiangnan) separated in the mid-18th century, with
sustained productivity increases in manufacturing and agriculture in England,
and static or worsening productivity in Jiangnan.
Robert Allen
contributes to the debate by assembling a detailed and historically rigorous
framework for aggregating costs on historical farming systems (England and the
lower Yangzi), and arriving at estimates of labor and land productivity, farm
wage incomes, and farm family incomes (Allen 2003). His farm model permits a consistent framework for estimating
costs and outputs of Yangtze farming.
His analysis supports detailed comparison of labor productivity in
England and the lower Yangzi Delta, and his findings are two-fold. First, he finds that the overall level
of farm labor productivity in the Yangzi Delta is a bit lower than that of
England, but higher than several other regions of Europe; and second, he finds
that this level of labor productivity is roughly constant between 1620 and 1820
((Allen 2003) : table 5). In other words, his analysis
contradicts the “involutionary” hypothesis of falling labor productivity during
these centuries. He also contradicts
the “revolutionary” thesis of rising productivity; he finds that gross output
of rice per day of labor increased significantly between 1620 to 1820;
but—contrary to Li—when we take into account the cost of beancake
fertilizer, net output is roughly constant ((Allen 2003) : 11). “Labour productivity in the Yangzi
Delta was about 79% of that in England in 1800. While this was, of course, less than the English or Dutch
achievement, it was considerably above that of most countries in Europe”
(11).
Allen’s overall finding is supportive of
the judgment that the rural Chinese standard of living was comparable to that
of rural England, and that there is little evidence of productivity increase or
decline in Chinese agriculture in the early modern period. There was significant change in the
intensity of agriculture and fertilizer use (beancake); these changes led to
rising output; and the cost of new inputs kept overall labor productivity
roughly constant. And, most
significantly, he finds that labor productivity was roughly unchanged through
the two centuries between 1620 and 1820—a finding that contradicts the
expectations of the involution theory.
Thus Allen finds that neither the involutionary nor the revolutionary
model is adequate to the Chinese data.
This supports the view that Chinese agriculture was neither leading to
sustained per-capita growth, nor was it experiencing a longterm trend towards
involution. It was instead stable
and progressive, from the point of view of labor productivity, per capita
output, and farm incomes.
Robert
Allen’s work on real wages in Europe and Asia provide a substantially stronger
basis for empirical assessment of the question the rural standard of living
than we have had hitherto. The
central question here is, how did rural real wages compare in England and
China? Allen is able to address
this problem using the farm economy model developed in “Agricultural
Productivity and Rural Incomes” discussed above (Allen 2003). This
model incorporates data on crops, prices, and labor expenditures for Yangzi and
English Midlands farms. He is able
to calculate estimates for family incomes in the two settings. He finds that the Yangzi Delta family
income per day was 34.2d in 1620 and 21.0d in 1820; and the latter figure
compares to 19.8d for the English Midlands (Table 8). These data indicate that Yangzi family income fell during
these centuries but remained slightly higher than rural English family income
in 1820. And based on trends in
English rural wages reported in (Allen 2005), we can infer that the Yangzi family income was
measurably higher than its English counterpart in 1620. These points vindicate Pomeranz’s claim
that Chinese rural incomes were comparable to their English counterparts in the
early modern period.
In
“Real Wages in Europe and Asia” Allen (Allen 2005) provides a methodology that involves careful
estimation of a “cost of living” index for England, India, Japan, and
China. This index is based on a
wage basket of staple food and clothing, for which there are very good price
data in England and sporadic price data in China. He also provides a simpler index based on the price of a
calorie of the basic foodstuff in each country. He then converts money wage data from several countries into
a common real wage, and uses these estimates for England, India, Japan, and
China to provide a quantitative answer to some of the most basic issues in the
involution debate. Centrally, he
concludes for the middle of the eighteenth century, that “using the price of a
calorie as a deflator indicates that there was little difference in the
standard of living of English, Chinese, and Japanese farm workers. . . . Asia did not lag behind Europe” (Allen 2005). This
estimate is for a time period that falls within the period of dispute between
Pomeranz and Huang, and it clearly favors the Pomeranz position. Moreover, he finds that the Chinese
standard of living rose substantially between 1700 and 1900: “The standard of
living in the Yangzi rose by over 40% between the early eighteenth and early
twentieth centuries” (Allen 2005).
Throughout
his writings Robert Brenner attempts to make a causal argument about
differences in the profile of economic development, based on the two kinds of
differentiation noted here; he argues that high and low economic developers
correspond to differences in social-property systems (Brenner 1976, 1982). This is
a simple causal argument with two foundations: first, an analysis of
co-variation between outcomes and institutional settings, and second, an
account of a possible social mechanism that shows why social-property systems
of a certain sort should be expected to result in sustained economic
growth. Brenner brings this
perspective to bear in his contribution to the involution debate (Brenner and Isett 2002).[1]
Brenner’s
(and apparently Huang’s) explanation of English case, in contrast to China,
involves three large factors: (a) Property relations permitted capitalist
agriculture in England (Brenner 1976, 1982). (b)
Chinese demographic practices permitted high fertility, moderate mortality in
China—leading to endemic population pressure on resources. And, (c) implementation of
technological innovation was rapid in England as a result of the incentives for
capitalist farmers. The result of
this combination of factors is a steady increase in productivity in England,
sustained improvement in the standard of living, and the gathering financial
capacity of elites to invest in modernizing technologies in manufacturing. By contrast, Brenner characterizes
China as witnessing erosion of the standard of living and a failure to
introduce modern technologies and agricultural improvements; and by inference,
the explanation of this outcome is the less favorable institutional setting
that Chinese society created for innovation and investment in agriculture.
Pomeranz takes issue with both aspects of
this theory. He disputes the
premise that Chinese agriculture failed to make progress in implementing new
technologies of irrigation, cropping, and fertilizers. And he disputes the thesis of “superior
institutional setting” as an explanation of England’s later economic takeoff. Instead, he argues that that England
shoots forward because of resources from the Americas, cotton and agriculture
imports, extension of land in the Americas, and the exploitation of slave labor
in the Americas.
Mark Elvin provides a different basis of
analysis of the “involutionary” character of Chinese economic development in
his pathbreaking environmental history of China (Elvin 2004). Elvin
closes his treatment of China’s environmental history, and the history of
agricultural development that is deeply entangled within this history, by
offering a way of thinking about the level of “environmental pressure” within a
given economy. Elvin introduces
this concept as an alternative way of assessing the degree of intensity with
which the Chinese farming system had developed in its use of labor and
environmental resources; extremely high environmental pressure would imply
something very similar to the high-level equilibrium trap he had hypothesized
earlier in his writings (Elvin 1972).[2] Elvin also argues that “environmental
pressure” might have functioned as a formidable barrier to China’s adoption of
modern economic forms and manufacturing systems: the sunk costs of control of
the environment made it difficult to consider adoption of an entirely different
system of production.
Elvin attempts to begin the project of
assigning a quantitative measure to “environmental pressure” by offering a
definition. He singles out the
quantity “cost of restoring existing resources to their prior level of output
for the same level of input” and the ratio of this quantity to total output,
and he suggests that we consider the rate at which this ratio changes over time
((Elvin 2004) : 455 ff.)).
An environment under severe “pressure” is one in which the cost of
restoring it to its prior level of productivity exceeds the total output of the
economy for that period. Elvin
observes that innovations in technology, or the discovery of new external
sources of resources, can dramatically change the degree of pressure
experienced by a given economy; so a new water control technology can
potentially greatly reduce the costs of restoration of the water system at the
end of the production period. That
said, the judgment that a given environment is under severe environmental
pressure appears to represent an alternative basis for arguing for the
conclusion that this economy is undergoing involution.
Elvin then asks the question whether there
is a basis for comparing China and Europe according to this measure ((Elvin 2004)) : 460).
Here he explicitly considers Pomeranz’s claims about seventeenth-century
parity between England and the lower Yangzi, and he suggests that we have
reason to judge that China was under substantially greater environmental
pressure than Europe in the early modern period. He notes that the decisive empirical basis for establishing
this conclusion is currently unavailable, but he argues that the evidence of
contemporary observations and comparisons offered by Jesuit observers permits
some preliminary conclusions. He
offers this conclusion: “Overall, the Jesuit evidence … makes a persuasive
prima facie case that the ‘pressure’ of the late-imperial Chinese productive
system on the natural environment … was significantly heavier than that at
least of France around the beginning of the modern era. This can probably be extended, though
with less certainty, to other parts of northwestern Europe” ((Elvin 2004) : 469-470)).
Significantly, Elvin counts the cost of hydraulic maintenance work as a
large component of the renewal cost for resources; other large components
include the intensity of Chinese farming and the need for annual labor to
replace soil fertility (because of the lack of fallow).
Elvin links this discussion to the
involution debate, but we may question whether the circumstance of
“environmental exhaustion” that he analyzes is significantly related to the
condition of involution that Huang postulates. One line of thought serves to link the two conditions
together: if we consider the example of an irrigation system that requires more
labor for dredging of silt each year in order to produce the same output of
grain, then we can infer falling productivity (grain / total labor input). So rising “environmental pressure” in
this instance leads directly to falling labor productivity—or in other
words, involution. Sustainability
requires restoration of the production system to its initial level of
productivity. If producers choose
not to invest the full amount needed for restoration, then the production
system will have lower productivity in the next cycle—with the consequence,
once again, of involution in the technical sense (declining labor
productivity). But the connection is not always so tight.
For, as Elvin notes, there are multiple
ways of dealing with environmental pressure. As he emphasized in his earlier work on the high-level
equilibrium trap (Elvin 1973), innovations in technology and technique provide the
means for pushing back the productivity frontier. But here Elvin’s earlier conclusions are directly relevant
to his analysis of environmental pressure; in his arguments surrounding the
theory of the high-level equilibrium trap, Elvin argued that the Chinese
production system had fully exploited the available repertoire of technological
and technical innovations that could shift the system to higher
productivity. And on this
assumption, the conclusion that “rising environmental pressure entails falling labor
productivity” is economically inescapable.
Consider briefly the treatment that
Pomeranz provides of resources and environment. Pomeranz makes a great deal of the fact that European
exploration and colonialism provided vast sources of natural resources into the
control of European nations, including England. The “underground forests” of England’s coal reserves, the
“hidden acreage” of South American and Caribbean plantations, and the labor of
colonial peoples all provided infusions of resources into the English economic
system; and when these inputs are incorporated into the calculation of
“environmental pressure” that Elvin provides, they have the effect of relieving
environmental pressure.
So it would appear that Elvin is providing
a conceptual basis for a new line of criticism of the thesis that England and
China were in comparable economic situations at the beginning of the modern
era. This approach is worthy of
further empirical and historical investigation.
It
is now possible to delineate some areas of best judgment with respect to the
primary disagreements involved in the involution debate. Thanks to detailed and rigorous
empirical work by Bozhong Li and Robert Allen, the situation of agricultural
productivity and the real wage in England and the Yangzi delta is somewhat more
clear today than it was when this debate originated. It appears reasonable to conclude with Robert Allen that the
real wage for Yangzi peasants was roughly equal to that of English farm
laborers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This finding supports Pomeranz and Lee in their assertion
that conditions for ordinary people in England and China were roughly
comparable.
Second,
it seems reasonable to conclude on the basis of work by Bozhong Li and Robert
Allen, that agricultural labor productivity was roughly comparable in these two
regions as well. As Pomeranz
emphasizes, we must take full account of the very different circumstances of
agriculture in the two settings; but careful measurement by Robert Allen of the
inputs and products of English farms, combined with Bozhong Li’s analysis of
the Jiangnan farm economy, suggests that farm productivity, measured in terms
of working days per calorie-equivalent of grain, was comparable as well. These data do not support Huang’s
assertion of a longterm tendency towards falling labor productivity in the
Chinese rice economy.
Third,
the substantial progress that has been made in Chinese historical demography in
the past decade effectively eliminates the crude Malthusian interpretation of
Chinese population behavior. There
was no unconstrained tendency towards population increase up to the carrying
capacity of the land; instead, fertility rates and rates of population increase
were essentially comparable to those of European populations. This finding too casts doubt on the
involution hypothesis, since unrestrained population increase is the central
causal mechanism that was hypothesized to push the process of involution.
These
findings sound “final”; but, as Robert Allen emphasizes, the quality of the
economic data that is available for measurement of productivity and real wages
in Asia remains sketchy and questionable.
The best evidence available today supports the summary conclusions
rehearsed above; but it is also possible that subsequent research will call
some of these specific findings into doubt.
What
remains unresolved in the debate is the large causal question: what accounts
for the “Great Divergence” between Western Europe and East Asia in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?
Here the most promising perspective is that of R. Bin Wong, in his
insistence on the necessity of pursuing an economic history that does not
privilege the “master narrative” of western economic revolution. Instead, we need to attempt to identify
the conjunction of circumstances in Western Europe and East
Asia—environmental, international, political, demographic—that
created the characteristic patterns of development in the two settings. And we need further historical and
theoretical research to come to conclusions about the relative importance of a
variety of causes of the “great divergence” between England and China around
1800.
Let
us turn now to a related debate that focuses on the status of the Chinese rural
economy at the end of the Qing and into the Republican era. This debate raises some of the same
issues, but in a later and shorter period of Chinese economic history: the
transition from the final years of the Qing empire into the early decades of
the Republican period. Many
observers have regarded this period as one of agricultural stagnation, falling
real rural incomes, worsening tenancy relations, and increasing rural
inequalities. These unfavorable
economic developments are often taken as preparing the ground for the
successful peasant revolution in China.
In the 1980s several economic historians offered substantial criticism
of this prevailing wisdom. Arguing
from a neoclassical economic perspective, Thomas Rawski (Rawski 1989), Ramon Myers (Myers 1970), and Loren Brandt (Brandt 1989) have argued that the early Republican economy was
more dynamic and forward-moving than this interpretation would suggest. According to these historians,
agricultural productivity was rising, rural incomes were improving, and labor
markets permitted a degree of social opportunity to the rural poor. These are important and controversial
claims; if sustained, they require a significant reevaluation of the state and
direction of change of the Chinese rural economy in the early twentieth
century.
Many
observers have regarded the late Qing and Republican period as one of
agricultural stagnation, stagnant or falling real rural incomes, worsening tenancy
relations and increasing rural inequalities. These unfavorable economic developments are often taken as
setting the stage for the successful peasant revolution in China: increasing
rural misery gave peasants a strong motive to support a party that promised
land reform and a program aimed at improving the lot of the rural poor. Dwight Perkins holds that China’s rural
economy in the early twentieth century was almost stagnant, with little or no
per capita growth in gross domestic product. There was growth of output, but it occurred at essentially
the rate of population increase—resulting in stagnant per capita incomes
((Perkins 1975a, 1975b) : 121-122).
Perkins acknowledges that there was sustained growth in certain modern
sectors (e.g. cotton textiles, transport, banking), but reminds us that
agriculture and traditional manufacturing dwarfed the modern sector; and he
argues that these sectors showed little or no growth ((Perkins 1975a) : 120-125).
The benefits of modern-sector growth would only be realized in living
standard improvement in later decades.
Perkins’ target is the position that held that living standards were
falling during this period (represented by Tawney). Against this position, Perkins maintains that the balance of
evidence suggests that this was not the case: “the view that the incomes of all
or of the vast majority of the people were declining during the first half of
the twentieth century is not supported by currently available evidence” ((Perkins 1975a) : 124).
Perkins also makes an effort to assess the direction of change in land
concentration, tenancy and income distribution during the period. He holds that tenancy rates remained
approximately the same during the period, and he denies that there was an
abrupt increase in tenancy or landlessness during the early twentieth century ((Perkins 1969) : 100).
Another
important statement of the received view of the 1960s is Albert Feuerwerker’s The
Chinese Economy, Ca. 1870-1911 (Feuerwerker 1969).
Feuerwerker’s assessment too emphasizes economic stagnation:
“Fundamental economic change and modern economic growth, however, in so far as
they have been accomplished in twentieth-century China, did not come of their
own momentum out of the late-Ch’ing economic system. They were preeminently the by-products of a new and possibly
still tenuous political integration which itself was achieved only after
decades of political strife, foreign invasion and civil war” ((Feuerwerker 1969) : 1).
Feuerwerker maintains that agricultural techniques remained roughly unchanged
throughout the period (1880-1930s), with output increasing in pace with
population growth through small increase in cultivated acreage ((Feuerwerker 1969) : 3). He
takes it as certain that rural living standards did not improve throughout the
period, but doubts that evidence exists to demonstrate a significant decline in
living standards (p. 5).
Feuerwerker believes that tenancy rates probably did not increase in the
early decades of the twentieth century, and he doubts that effective rent
levels increased during the period (p. 14). He thus adopts roughly the same view as Perkins: that output
approximately kept pace with population increase, with the result that average
rural welfare remained about constant.
Scholarship in the 1970s focused more
attention on distributive issues in the rural economy: the status of tenancy,
landlessness, wage labor, peasant welfare and rural inequalities. Such authors as Mark Selden, Victor
Lippit, Carl Riskin and Joseph Esherick argued that inequalities increased
during the period. Mark Selden
emphasizes the deterioration of living conditions in Shensi. He details the destructive effects of
warlordism and famine in Shensi, and he argues that tenancy in Shensi increased
substantially in the 1930s, accompanied by increasing landlessness ((Selden 1971) : 7-8).
These worsening conditions are a central causal factor in Selden’s
analysis of the successes of Communist mobilization in Shensi. Likewise, Carl Riskin emphasizes the
significance of income and land inequalities in the Chinese rural economy ((Riskin 1987) : 24-26).
And Victor Lippit focuses attention on the disposition of the rural
surplus: through rent, taxation and usurious interest rates the peasant was
separated from the surplus available within the rural economy (Lippit 1974). He
argues that incomes based on these sources represented a significant portion of
China’s national income in the 1930s: rent (10.7 percent), farm business
profits (3.4 percent) and rural interest payments (2.8 percent), for a total of
16.9 percent. Moreover, Lippit
argues that, for reasons internal to China’s rural elites, these incomes were
not devoted to productive investment but elite consumption.
In
short, the received view represents the Chinese rural economy as largely
stagnant during the early Republican period. Technological change in agriculture was sparse. Living standards for peasants were
stagnant or falling. The main
fissure of disagreement within the field concerned the causes of the stagnation. One school of thought (the technological
school) held that the chief obstacles
to development were technological and demographic; population pressure on
resources led to an economy in which there was very little economic surplus
available for productive investment.
The other theory was the distributional school, which held that the traditional Chinese
economy generated substantial surpluses that could have funded economic
development, but that the elite classes used those surpluses in unproductive
ways.
Brandt
and Rawski focus their work on Chinese economic development in the late Qing
and early Republican periods. They
disagree about some issues; but they agree in rejecting many features of the
received view. Consider first some
of Thomas Rawski’s central findings.
Rawski argues that economic growth was significant and sustained in
pre-war China. It was driven by
modernization of transport, factory industry and commercial banking ((Rawski 1989) : xx).
Much of Rawski’s book focuses on industrial growth, but he maintains
that agriculture expanded in per capita terms as well. He estimates that agricultural growth
averaged 1.5 percent—about .5 percent
ahead of population growth. This
process of growth led to sustained increase in output and income per capita ((Rawski 1989) : 268), and this increase led to rising living
standards. Rawski provides a new
analysis of Buck’s data on rural living standards, to support the conclusion
that rural welfare was rising during the pre-war period ((Rawski 1989) : 287 ff.).
He argues that there is good evidence of rising consumption of cotton
cloth, which he takes to support the conclusion that living standards were
rising ((Rawski 1989) : 289).
Rawski summarizes his findings relevant to the rural economy in these
terms: “This study has produced a variety of direct and indirect evidence of
increasing per capita output, income and living standards in large areas of
rural China prior to the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1937” ((Rawski 1989) : 320).
Loren Brandt shares many of Rawski’s
assumptions. He holds that
commercialization progressed rapidly during this period, bringing greater
integration between domestic and international markets in rice, cotton, and
other important commodities; and that commercialization in turn induced growth
in agricultural output, improvement in the agricultural terms of trade, rising
real incomes for farmers and laborers alike, and a probable overall reduction
in the range of income inequalities in the countryside of central and eastern
China. In fact, Brandt draws a
parallel between the performance of the Chinese rural economy during this
period of rapid commercialization and its performance during the period of the
post-Mao rural reforms; in each case, he asserts, the gains were the result of
greater market activity and specialization. He maintains that the early Republican period witnessed
rising real incomes for farmers and laborers alike and a probable overall
reduction in the range of income inequalities in the countryside of central and
eastern China. Brandt uses these
conclusions about real wages to argue that labor productivity increased between
40 and 60 percent during the time period ((Brandt 1989) : 132)—suggesting that the rural economy was
improving rather respectably during the period. And he argues that commercialization of the rural economy
had the effect of significantly narrowing income inequalities in rural China ((Brandt 1989) : 138), by increasing the demand and opportunities
for labor. Finally, he denies that
land concentration was increasing during this period, arguing that the relative
share of income flowing to the bottom of the income distribution (tenant
farmers, small owner-farmers, landless workers, peddlers, handicraft workers)
improved during this period relative to landlords ((Brandt 1989) : 169-170).
Brandt’s position depends on several
premises: his argument for the extensive integration of rural China into the
world economy, his argument that rural wages and labor productivity were rising
in this period, and his argument that income inequalities probably improved
somewhat throughout this period.
How convincing are Brandt’s arguments for these claims? Here I will maintain that the evidence
that Brandt puts forward, while suggestive, falls far short of clinching his
case, and the interpretation of the early twentieth century rural economy as
static or worsening continues to be more credible.
Brandt makes the strongest case for his first
point—China’s extensive commercialization and integration into the world
economy. Brandt concedes that only
a small fraction of China’s economy depended on internationally traded goods,
but he argues that the small volume was sufficient to link commodity prices to
international levels rather than domestic demand. Surveying rice price data for South China, Siam, Burma,
India, and Saigon (the latter being the chief rice exporting markets in Asia),
he finds that there are high and rising price correlations between South China
and each of the major exporting markets ((Brandt 1989) : 19).
And he finds, further, that the interior Chinese economy showed similar
integration with respect to rice prices.
Without providing comparable detail from other locations, Brandt
suggests that these results obtain as well in markets for cotton and
wheat—supporting the contention that the Chinese rural economy was highly
commercialized, reasonably competitive, and extensively integrated into the
international economy.
Brandt’s arguments here are fairly
convincing. At the same time, this
is the least novel portion of the argument; few would disagree with the conclusion
that the Chinese rural economy was price-responsive and competitive in the
period in question. And the
well-documented shock to the Chinese economy produced by the Great
Depression—through its disruption of cotton prices—would be
unintelligible except on the assumption that Chinese cotton markets were
integrated with international prices.
(Philip Huang discusses this aspect of Chinese commercialization in The
Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China; (Huang 1985).) So
this line of thought is reasonably well grounded, but does not provide much
support for the view that conditions in the countryside were improving.
Let
us turn now to a more controversial part of Brandt’s argument: his contention
that output outpaced population growth during this period ((Brandt 1989) : 106 ff.) and that rural real wages and labor
productivity were rising significantly.
Brandt argues, contrary to much received opinion, that per capita output
was rising in the farm economy during this period: “Between the 1890s and
1930s, agricultural output in Central and East China increased more than two
times the estimated rate of population growth of 0.6 percent per annum”
(178)—or in other words, a 1.2% increase in output, accumulating to an
increase of 70 percent over the forty-five year period. Is this a credible conclusion? Brandt holds that other interpreters
have been misled by the fall in grain commerce flowing from the Middle and
Upper Yangzi paralleled by a rise in foreign rice imports (39). He believes that this shift represents
a reorganization of Chinese agricultural markets rather than a decline in
agricultural product. Because of
shifts in international rice prices, South China came to import rice from
Indochina and Siam for its urban population rather from than the Yangzi delta
(51). But Brandt estimates that
this drop in rice trade between the Yangzi and South China was more than
matched by an increase in demand in Yangzi cities, resulting by the 1920s in an
increase in demand of more than 20 million piculs of rice (53).
This
argument, however, depends entirely on estimates of rising demand (through
rising urban and non-agricultural populations); it is unsupported by any direct
estimate of rice output. Aggregate
output is affected by two chief variables: amount of acreage sown and changes
in labor productivity. Dwight Perkins judged that productivity remained constant
and rice acreage declined between 1914-1918 and 1931-1937, resulting in a
decline in domestic rice production of about 5.8 percent for China as a whole
and 11.9 percent for East and Central China ((Perkins 1969) : 276).
However, these declines are offset by substantial increases in wheat
cultivation ((Perkins 1969) : 250), implying a small net increase in grain
production. Brandt disputes Perkins’s rice production data, largely on the
ground that it is implausible that there was a drop in cultivated acreage in
the early twentieth century.
However, Perkins’s data does not have this implication; Brandt ignores
Perkins’s data on wheat cultivation showing that wheat acreage increased more
than the amount of decline in rice cultivation. And Brandt’s positive case is weak, since he does not
provide any direct evidence of rising rice output in the region, and (as he
himself notes), there are alternative possible explanations that could account
for the required increases in rice marketing (54). His case here is unconvincing, therefore; his arguments do
not establish that there was an increase of per capita rice output between 1915
and 1936. This does not show that
there was not such an increase; it
may have been so, but the data offered in this study does not establish it.
A
crucial part of Brandt’s argument is his analysis of farm wages. Brandt argues that real farm wages were
rising during the period; that farm wages were closely linked to other forms of
employment; and that it is reasonable to conclude on the basis of these points
that rural welfare was rising during the period. The data that Brandt employs here take the form of scattered
cross-sectional studies of wages for seasonal and long-term agricultural
laborers. Upon inspection, this
data is insufficient to the task, however. The Royal Asiatic Society compiled wage data for 1888 in
fifteen places; there is cross-sectional data for about 700 counties for the
1930s; and the Buck surveys reported time series wage data for about 100
counties in the 1930s. Brandt
converts the data from each of these sources into grain-equivalence wages (piculs of rice).
Between three and four piculs
of rice are required for subsistence. On the basis of the Royal Asiatic Society
reports Brandt concludes that the grain equivalent of the cash component of the
annual agricultural wage for the 1880s was about 5 piculs; for the 1930s he finds that the corresponding value
was between 4.21 piculs (Sichuan)
and 13.86 piculs (Shandong), with
a mean of 9.87 piculs (table 5.2,
pp. 114-115). This suggest a rough
doubling of the rural real wage and an annual increase of about 1.5
percent—or does it? The
argument is questionable.
First, these data sources are not
particularly convincing, particularly for the earlier period. The 1888 estimate depends on a very
small data set on the basis of which to estimate the level of the wage for
rural China (fairly casual observations in fifteen locations, only six of which
provide data on the annual wage).
And since this data does not allow Brandt to estimate the value of
in-kind payments (which were substantial), it is impossible to estimate the
total value of the wage. The 1930s data are more extensive but show substantial
variance, suggesting that the data is not particularly reliable (it is hard to
imagine that the real farm wage—and on Brandt’s argument, rural welfare
as well—in Shandong would be three times that in adjacent Henan). Here too the problem of the value of
in-kind payments arises; if in-kind payments declined in value in the later
period (as would be expected with the advance of commercialization), then
comparison of changes in the cash component overestimates the increase in the
wage. If, for example, the value
of in-kind payments declined from 60 percent to 40 percent of the wage, then a
doubling of the cash wage represents only a 33 percent increase in the total
wage. (Brandt considers the problem
posed by in-kind payments, but does not take it seriously enough.) So it is hard to regard these data sets
as establishing reasonable estimates of the farm wage for either period; the
most they allow us to conclude is that it is unlikely that the real wage fell
during this period.
The
final source that Brandt analyzes on this topic is the time series data
collected by John Lossing Buck in the 1930s (Buck 1937b, 1937a). This
data was collected by a number of investigators in about 100 places in China
for the time period 1901-1933.
Investigators were asked to collect the recollections of three
well-informed villagers in 1933 on the level of the cash farm wage for this
time period. Brandt normalizes
these cash estimates using his own price index and then computes growth rates
for each place surveyed by regressing the resulting real wages against
time. He finds a range of positive
growth rates for twenty-one out of twenty-nine places, with an average rate of
growth for all places of .9 percent.
Over a period of forty‑ five years this would result in a 50
percent increase in the real wage.
If taken at face value this is a significant, though hardly startling,
improvement in the real wage.
However, it is difficult to take this finding at face value. First (as Brandt himself acknowledges),
the data themselves are questionable, since they rely on the recollections of
observers over a thirty-year lapse of time. Second, this data reports only the cash component of the
wage; so if there was a decline in the value of in-kind payments, this data
will overestimate the rate of increase in the total wage. Finally, other
researchers have arrived at substantially lower estimates of growth on the
basis of the same data. Thomas
Rawski analyzes the same data using the same regression technique but a
different price series; his estimates for the provinces included in Brandt’s
study (Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hupeh, and Hunan) imply average
growth rates of -.03% (1901-1933), .43% (1914-1933), and .13% (1925-1933). Aggregating these rates over a forty-five-year
period, these values imply a fall
of one percent, a rise of 21 percent, and a rise of 6 percent depending on the
time period considered.[3] In the best case, then, Rawski’s
analysis implies a growth rate less than half that estimated by Brandt; in the
worst case his data implies a slight drop in the real farm wage in East and
Central China.
There
are enough uncertainties in these calculations of the behavior of the real
rural wage, therefore, to make Brandt’s conclusion that the real wage was rising
significantly largely unconvincing; it may have been so, but this data does not
establish the point. If anything,
reconsideration of this data appears to imply that any increase in the rural
real wage was less than .5 percent per year over the forty-five year period in
question, and may have been zero.
Rawski’s estimate of an average rate of growth of the real wage of about
.4 percent is more credible on the basis of this evidence; but the uncertainty
of the available evidence affects his conclusion equally severely.
We
might also consider what implications a slow rise in the real farm wage (if
established) would have for the state of rural welfare. For it is possible for the farm wage to
rise slowly while average rural income is falling—if, for example, there
is less employment overall, fewer days worked, or a larger pool of unemployed
or underemployed rural people. In
other words, a slow improvement in the farm wage paid is consistent with the
common perception of a general worsening of rural conditions in the first
several decades of the twentieth century.
What
inferences about productivity does this analysis of farm wages permit? Brandt reasons along neoclassical
lines: the wage is determined by the marginal product of labor; if wages are
rising, we can infer that the marginal product is rising, from which Brandt
infers in turn that the average product (a measure of productivity) was rising
as well. And in a competitive labor market with few barriers between types of
employment, the level of the farm wage ought to be closely correlated with the
returns to other forms of labor—with the result that we can conclude that
other forms of rural income were rising as well. On the basis of this line of reasoning, Brandt estimates
that labor productivity increased between 40 and 60 percent during the time
period (132)—suggesting that the rural economy was improving rather
respectably during the period.
Brandt
also makes an attempt to provide an indirect estimate of changes in labor
productivity by estimating population growth, agricultural labor force growth,
and output; this permits him to infer a growth rate in labor productivity (130
ff.). Assuming that per capita
consumption remained constant, Brandt estimates that labor productivity must
have increased 16.5 percent between 1893 and 1933. This is a figure substantially lower than that implied by
his analysis of real wage data (between 40 and 60 percent)—which might
lead one to conclude that the real wage estimates are flawed. Brandt, however, does not draw this
conclusion; instead he postulates that output must have risen more rapidly than
population increase, leading to rising per capita consumption of rice. And he
computes that a 50 percent increase in labor productivity would correspond to a
63 percent increase in output—an annual increase of 1.21 percent. This calculation is the basis for his
conclusion that output increased at about double the rate of population
increase in the period (.6 percent).
But note how highly conjectural this line of thought is; it would seem
more reasonable to conclude that labor productivity did not increase as rapidly as Brandt’s wage data
implies. And if per capita grain
consumption tended to decline during this period—as some observers
believe that it did—then even the modest 16.5 percent increase in
productivity disappears; a constant level of productivity implies a fall of 14
percent in per capita consumption, given the population data that Brandt
employs.
A
careful reading of Brandt’s arguments on these points suggests, then, that the
increase in labor productivity, if any, was small, and that Brandt’s upbeat
appraisal of the improving state of the rural economy during these decades is
unsubstantiated.
Turn
finally to Brandt’s interpretation of the distributive performance of the
commercializing Chinese economy.
He argues that commercialization of the rural economy had the effect of
significantly narrowing income inequalities in rural China (138), by increasing
the demand and opportunities for labor.
And he denies the common view that land concentration was increasing
during this period. He maintains that the relative share of income flowing to
the bottom of the income distribution (tenant farmers, small owner-farmers, landless
workers, peddlers, handicraft workers) improved during this period relative to
landlords (169-70). However, he
provides surprisingly little support for this conclusion, devoting well over
half the relevant chapter to a discussion of patterns of farm household
behavior across large and small farms.
He counts the increases in the rural real wage discussed above as
probably raising the lower quintiles of income earners relative to the top
quintile; as we found above, however, he appears to substantially overestimate
the magnitude of this increase.
Second, he doubts the common belief that land holdings became more
stratified during this period, and he believes that the terms of tenancy had
improved for the tenant by the 1930s, reducing the effective rent from about 50
percent of output to about 40 percent (table 6.20, p. 171)—thus improving
tenant incomes at the expense of landlords. And he holds that the increasing
opportunities for sideline activities (textiles, refining oils, sericulture,
etc.) primarily benefited the poorest strata. These claims do not receive much empirical support,
however. Almost all the
investigations made in the 1930s suggest the reverse conclusions. For example, his discussion of the data
about rural labor, landlessness, and tenancy is unconvincing. Brandt accepts the National Land
Commission estimate (1934) that only 1.57 percent of rural households were pure
farm‑laborer households; Joseph Esherick (Esherick 1981) shows convincingly, however, that this figure is
substantially too low and argues for an estimate of 8 percent in this category
(based on Chinese surveys and economic gazetteers from the 1930s), and Thomas
Wiens reports an average of 10 percent (Wiens 1982).[4]
Brandt’s
arguments for improving productivity, output, real wages, and inequalities are
unconvincing, and his view of the Chinese rural economy experiencing
substantial improvement in these decades is unsubstantiated. In each case the empirical arguments
that Brandt constructs are too soft to justify the strong conclusions that he
draws. And Brandt’s case is
single-minded in its sole attention to available quantitative data on wages,
prices, volume of trade, and the like.
There is no attempt to buttress or test the economic interpretation that
he offers through consideration of more qualitative information that is
available concerning the state of the rural economy in these years (village
studies, travelers’ reports, and the like). Many readers will prefer an approach that makes an effort to
construct an interpretation of the Chinese economy that balances quantitative
and qualitative data; in this regard Philip Huang’s work—which Brandt
sharply criticizes—provides a better model.
There
is an apparent tension between the two debates we have considered here that
ought to be addressed directly. In
the first debate, our analysis supports the “non-involutionary” position of
Pomeranz and Wong for the period of 1700-1850. We conclude with Pomeranz and Wong that the rural economy of
the lower Yangzi was improving, that the standard of living was comparable to
that of the rural population in England, and that the agricultural system was
capable of incorporating improvements in technique leading to some rise in farm
productivity. In the second
debate, our analysis supports the “impoverishment” interpretation of the early
twentieth century: farm productivity and output were outpaced by population,
the standard of living for peasants and other rural people was falling, and the
economic system was falling short of its central challenge of supporting a
rising quality of life for its population. Are these conclusions inconsistent? Or are there important historical
factors that distinguish between China’s economic experience in the early
modern period and the early Republican period?
Here
it is worth recalling the severity and breadth of the economic, social, and
environmental circumstances that China encountered in the first forty years of
the twentieth century. The century
from 1850 to 1950 was one of unprecedented hardship and disruption for most of
China. The Taiping Rebellion
brought widespread devastation to China at mid-nineteenth century, at the cost
of millions of lives and great destruction to the economic structure. Rebellion, civil war, and the period of
warlordism brought additional destruction to most parts of China; these
circumstances made coordinated economic efforts difficult, they interfered with
inter-regional economic activity and trade, and they created local insecurity
that made even small improvements in agriculture and manufacture difficult. And rampant, extortionate taxation
under warlords increasingly impaired the ability of peasant families to satisfy
their most basic needs. Further,
China experienced severe economic costs in the form of reparations to foreign
powers early in the century.
Following the Boxer War, the European parties forced reparations of 450
million taels of silver, and reparations to Japan following the first
Sino-Japanese War amounted to payment of 230 million taels—compared to an
annual Qing revenue of only 89 million taels. These vast amounts of resources were consequently not
available for the project of modernization of China’s economy. Finally, China experienced an unusual
number of natural calamities during the first part of the twentieth century: changes
of course and flooding of the Yellow River, flooding of the Yangzi in 1931 and
1935, and devastating droughts in North China in the 1930s and 1940s.[5]
Given this series of debilitating
challenges to China’s economic prosperity—the financial cost of
reparations and foreign indemnities, the economic and political disruption
created by warlordism in the early decades of the period, the stresses of
wartime occupation by Japan beginning in the 1930s, and the cumulative costs of
natural calamities—it is unsurprising that the farm economy would suffer
and that the rural standard of living would fall. We might regard the “involution” of the twentieth century as
a clear example of the contingency of economic history and the crucial role
that non-systemic factors play. It
was not an underlying “logic of development” that led to China’s impoverishment
in the first part of the twentieth century, but rather a series of historically
contingent and tragic circumstances that combined to bring about impoverishment
and decline for China’s population.
Why are these debates important for China
scholars outside of the precincts of economic history? There are several important
reasons. First, it has seemed
important to many China historians to arrive at judgments about China’s
potential for autonomous economic development independent of western intervention. Were there economic institutions and
processes at work within China’s domestic economy in the late Qing that might,
in other circumstances, have led to a process of modernization and change? Or was China caught hopelessly in a
high-level equilibrium trap, from which it could be liberated only through some
exogenous shock (Elvin, 1973)?
Much of the import of Rawski’s book is the conclusion that there were
powerful processes of modernization and growth already at work in China in the
1880s. This conclusion supports a
counterfactual historical judgment: if China’s domestic and international
circumstances had been somewhat different; if the Qing had survived in a
reformist mode, or if the Republican revolution had installed an effective
national government; if China had not been invaded by Japan; if China had not
been drawn into civil war and the warlord era—then China might well have
developed into a modernizing market economy. This conclusion is sympathetic to those who offer a
“China-centered” approach to the study of China (e.g. (Cohen 1984)).
A second reason these debates should be of
interest to China historians more generally has to do with the causes of the
Communist revolution. Our
construal of the Chinese Communist Party’s successes in rural mobilization and
ultimate seizure of power depends a great deal on our assumptions about the
material welfare of the rural population.
If things were bad and getting worse, then mobilization is easy to
understand. If the economy was
generally improving and if the results of improvement were being experienced
as a generally rising standard of living, then we cannot cite immiseration as a
cause of the revolution. And if
(as Rawski and Brandt believe) the processes of commercialization and the extension
of ever-more-efficient markets were undercutting the forms of pre-capitalist
exploitation that existed in rural China (extortionate rents, bonded labor
relations), then we cannot explain the success of mobilization as the
consequence of the Chinese peasantry’s willingness to challenge an exploitative
and worsening social order. If, on
the other hand, this benign view of the neoclassical school is unpersuasive,
then the immiseration and worsening inequalities interpretation remains
salient for our interpretation of the success of rural mobilization strategies.
One
important result of study of these important current debates about China’s
economic history is this. Let us
consider China’s historical development—economic, agricultural,
political, social, military—in its own terms, but informed by the best
available social theoretical insights and concepts; let us identify China’s own
“paradigms” of development, its own pathways of political development and
economic change; and let us use those new-found paradigms to inflect our
understanding of the processes of other parts of the world. Finally, let us recognize that the
hypotheses of social theory takes us a ways down the road of being able to
explain particular pathways of historical development in a variety of contexts;
but social theory does not permit us to make confident predictions about
uniquely determined outcomes. In
place of the overtones of inevitability—population increase,
technological change, improvement in agricultural productivity—we get
more nuanced narratives of diversity and contingency, and the recognition that
historical outcomes are under-determined by any particular and limited set of
causal factors. And in fact, Wong,
Lee, and Pomeranz show that careful comparative study of the economic histories
of different regions of Eurasia will establish this plasticity of outcome. For example, Wong carefully assesses
the literature on proto-industrialization in Europe; finds that very similar
processes of rural manufacture are present in both Europe and China; and argues
that the causes of European “breakthrough” must therefore be sought
elsewhere. More generally, he
argues that similar processes of commercialization and population dynamics are
associated with very different paths to (or away from) industrialization ((Wong 1997) : 46-47).
The
comparative studies of Europe and China that are central to the involution
debate invite us to reflect on the question of the role of social theory in
historical inquiry. Wong
recognizes that reliance on current social theory is inescapable in historical
analysis (what else would provide the analytical basis for comparison and
hypothesis?), but he emphasizes the importance of doing so with care and
critical intelligence. As Susanne
Rudolph puts the point, “At this stage we need fragile theoretical templates,
made of soft clay rather than hard steel, that adapt to the variety of evidence
and break when they do not fit” ((Rudolph 1987:738) : 738).
Crucially, Wong insists on the point that the researcher must be
critical in extending ideal-typical concepts of structures and processes from
the European context to an Asian context.
More acutely, we need to find new ideal-typical configurations of
institutions and processes in Asia (and other world civilizations), to add
depth to our understanding of European history. Finally, Wong, like other scholars, emphasizes the plasticity
of large historical developments.
There are multiple contingent factors involved in any large historical
process, and there is room for choice by agents at all points along the way.
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[1] Brenner’s comparative treatment of English and French
agrarian development is discussed in (Little 1998) : chapter 7.
[2] Elvin’s concept of the high-level equilibrium trap is
discussed in (Little 1998) : chapter 8.
[3] (Rawski 1989). Rawski
too concludes that real wages were rising during the period, but more slowly
than Brandt’s estimate; he suggests an average annual rate of increase of about
.4 percent.
[4] Philip Huang also makes an effort to estimate the
extent of hired labor in North China, and arrives at a rough estimate of 14 to
17 percent of farm work being performed by hired labor (Huang 1985).
[5] Conversations with Bozhong Li and his generous
sharing of an unpublished manuscript permitted me to see the importance of the
circumstances described in this section for interpreting the performance of
China’s rural economy in the early twentieth century.