Steve: You wrote: "James, What are the implications (as you see them) for the Chinese political economy at present of China and Europe being roughly equal at the turn of the 18th century? "In China, this is a big bone of contention for Dengists, something they love to harp on...China went wrong by not developing the forces of production etc. etc....now is the time to not make the Maoist mistake again, embrace markets, open more markets to competition from foreign capital and move forward...Ya see, we were equal with the west (however loosely defined that term is) then....so we have nothing to fear in opening more to markets, global, national, or alien..." Steve, I have no idea. I do know that Chinese historians have been arguing for a long time that China was evolving toward capitalism more or less parallel to Europe in earlier times. See, for instance, Fu Chu-Fu and Li Ching-neng. (1956). THE SPROUTS OF CAPITALIST FACTORS WITHIN CHINA'S FEUDAL SOCIETY. Western Washington University Program in East Asia Studies, Occasional Paper No. 7; and C. Tung. (1979). AN OUTLINE HISTORY OF CHINA. Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co. There was a discussion of these matters on the World History Net (H-WORLD) last year. Ken Pomeranz (UC-Irvine) posted the following message (quoted in part): on 3/28/98: "Brad DeLong is right to wonder at the poor fit between images of a technologically stagnant China and its relative success in providing for its people -- but the problem is even sharper than that, and suggests to me that Jim Blaut is quite likely right about the larger point at issue. First of all, China did not feed its people "badly" in 1800. Recent calculations of calorie consumption per capita for at least the more developed parts of China in the late 18th century match up very well with those for comparable classes of people in Northwestern Europe -- in fact the Chinese figures are generally a bit higher. Protein comparisons may tilt towards Europe, but even that is not clear, and at any rate, Chinese levels of protein intake seem perfectly adequate. "Life expectancies at age 1 in the parts of China for which we have data are generally higher than those for Continental Europe even as late as 1800, and (depending on how you tweak Wrigley and Schofield's numbers) may even match those for England at that date; they certainly still match it ca. 1750... "Moreover, if one takes the years 1550-1850 (which should favor Europe more than a comparison starting ca. 1300, and which also gets us away from some very poor data) the Chinese population grew at roughly the same rate as Europe's, while all the samples we have so far suggest that the Chinese birth rate was significantly lower (about which more later); with emigration from both places too small to matter over most of this period, this suggests that Chinese death rates were _lower_ than European ones. "Now granted, life expectancy is not the same as standard of living, and it is theoretically possible that though they lived just as long as Europeans, 18th century Chinese were less well fed, clothed, etc., by some other measurement. But whether this is true is an empirical question, and my research thus far (currently embodied in a very long book manuscript and a couple of papers) suggests that Chinese were not worse off than Europeans as a whole, and that Chinese from the richer parts of the country were either on a par with or only slightly behind those in the richest parts of Europe (England and Holland) as late as 1750. "This leaves us with a lot to explain through technological (or organizational) advances that do not loom large in elite sources -- what Brad felicitously calls innovations "at the rice paddy level" -- and so far "we" (by which I mean my fellow China specialists) have not done a great job of it. But some areas to look at do seem clear: most, though not all, involve the diffusion of existing best practices rather than new breakthroughs. One is sanitation (especially the very rapid disposal of urban waste, which both made water clean enough to drink --after boiling -- and added fertilizer to the countryside), which was way ahead of European standards until the 19th century. Another is improvements in the use of off-farm sources of fertilizer (from ground-up soybean cake to animal bones to the aforementioned urban wastes) -- from what I can piece together, even farmers in relatively backward North China not only added more fertilizer to the soil than their English counterparts ca.1800, but applied it in a much more effective way. Another is the almost universal use of very efficient stoves which (combined with very labor intensive fuel gathering) meant that lots more land could be cleared for crops without creating an energy crisis -- these advances in the use of fuel may not have had the same long-term revolutionary implications that England's increased expertisein mining and using coal did, but that, I would suggest, is evident only in retrospect. Various others concern improved (and more widely used) irrigation (learning to sink deeper wells, etc.) improvements in terracing, adoption of various new crops and new varieties of existing crops, and so on." Cheers Jim B
