Published by EH.Net (January 2023).

Debin Ma and Richard Von Glahn, eds. *The Cambridge Economic History of
China: Volume II. *Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 845 pp.
$155 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1108425537.

Reviewed by Jamin Andreas Hübner, LCC International University and
University of the People.



The second volume of *The Cambridge Economic History of China *picks up
where the first volume left off (reviewed here). It covers 1800 to the
present, which includes major turning points in the evolution of China’s
economy. The most notable include Britain’s conquest of the flourishing
Qing dynasty in the 1840s, its eventual collapse and the creation of the
Republic of China in 1912, Mao’s establishment of the People’s Republic of
China in 1949, the “Reform era” (post-1978), and the most recent phase
(post-Great Recession), which is a return to top-down planning and Party
conformity.

For over 2,000 years, “China has sustained the largest single human society
on the planet through the development of one of the most sophisticated
agrarian systems in history” (p. 87). Before British colonization of China,
the Chinese empire was “the largest economy on earth” (p. 531), where the
“Qing…enjoyed standards of living comparable or even superior to those of
Europe” (p. 83). There was little indication that things would change. But
the Opium Wars did just that. While trade with the West was fairly limited
up to this point, the victorious British forced “free trade” (p.
83)—requiring that China open its ports abroad. As with any major change in
trade, this was viewed as an investment blessing to some, but also “as a
destructive force capable of impoverishing certain sectors of the
population and economy” (p. 365). Furthermore, “foreign nationals were
exempt from the jurisdiction of Chinese law” (p. 414).

This “semicolonial” subordination (p. 415) to western power inaugurated a
great reversal that Kenneth Pomeranz, Andre Gunder Frank, and others have
written about. Contrary to ordinary, Eurocentric history, Western economic
dominance (1850s-2008) was not a long-term, inevitable result of superior
institutions founded over 2,000 years ago, but a highly contingent blip on
the screen of Asian dominance in the world system. The book traces out
these dramatic changes in chapters covering ideology, institutions and
enterprises, finance, money, markets, business organization, foreign trade
and investment, education, and other areas up to and beyond the Maoist era.

Readers may find interesting the unusual role played in the Chinese economy
by Christian missionaries —who poured into the country starting in the
1860s. By the 1920s, “94% of Chinese counties had records of a missionary
presence” (p. 391). This led to the development of a huge number of schools
with new curriculum, as well as hospitals. “A great majority of the
subjects in the curriculum of the new schools were novel to the Chinese”
(p. 393), and improved healthcare opportunities facilitated further
population growth (p. 394) and perhaps more critical reflection that helped
the revolts of 1911. Readers also learn that (in crude and simplistic
terms) “Communism and violent Communist movements originate from
Christianity, and naturally the Christian church was essential for the
creation of the first totalitarianism” (p. 541). That is, similar to Europe
and Catholicism, the institutional churches and movements involved in China
validated and empowered state ambitions.

The road to Chinese economic and political statism was gradual. “As early
as 1912, Sun [Yat-sen] stated that all major industries in China should be
owned by the state” (p. 185); China had to make up for lost time in
industrialization. The world wars and threats of Japan provided further
reason or opportunity to centralize economic control (p. 165, 186-87). The
“institutional genes” of “imperial institution and secretive organization”
(p. 543) also contributed to this move. By the time of Mao, the road to
totalitarianism had already been laid, and Mao explicitly took Stalin’s
model to greater extremes. However, some contributors contend,
“Totalitarianism is foreign to the Chinese. When the CCP was established in
1921, the number of Chinese who knew constitutionalism was far more than
those who knew Marxism or Bolshevism” (p. 543). There was nothing
inevitable about China’s turn towards totalitarian communism—anymore than
industrialization and capitalism was inevitable for the British over a
century earlier. Whatever the case, the advent of the Maoist period was
filled with contradictions not unlike the Bolshevik Revolution. Just as the
Bolsheviks promised economic democracy and worker control but then reneged
in 1918, so the Chinese Constitution “recognized the peasants’ rights to
private land and the property rights of the owners of private firms”—only
to nationalize/collectivize a year later (p. 549).

Maoism is popularly known for its cult around Mao and the “Great Leap
Famine” (1958-1961), where about 30 million people (needlessly) died. This
was apparently caused by (a) the use of grain to finance industrialization
and repay Soviet debt instead of feeding Chinese people, (b) the cruel
confiscation of metal from the population (including cooking tools) to
support industrialization, and (c) the consolidation of agricultural
cooperatives into ineffective “gigantic peoples’ communes” (p. 645). By
this “Great Leap,” China would become “self-reliant,” and never worry about
being colonized by the West again (p. 717-19). Maoism as a whole did
eliminate excess wealth inequality, increase life expectancy and primary
education, and achieved  “food security”; and China “fared better than many
other countries—Meiji Japan and Industrial Revolution Britain come to
mind—during the early stages of their industrialization” (p. 639). The
Maoist consolidation also, in some ways, made the reform era more effective
(p. 733), if not simply provided the industrial infrastructure for the
next, and most successful phase of all (1970s-2008).

Formal recognition of private property came back in 2004 and, with other
reforms, spurred a surge of private enterprise. Private investment,
financial reform, entry in the WTO in 2001 (though see p. 827), and less
restrictions empowered China’s economy. The Great Recession and Xi
Jinping’s grand visions amplified—and overextended—China’s ambitions and
initiated a resurgence of top-down control (p. 817-820) and a return of the
leader’s personality cult. “Since 2013 all private firms and NGOs…are
required to set up CCP branches within the firm and organization,” and
“Discussions of constitutionalism and judicial independence are prohibited”
(p. 562). Religious freedom is now being eradicated. Academics are facing
new obstacles, like “restrictions on participation in international
projects and conferences. Foreign textbooks now arouse suspicion” (p. 822).
China is vastly better off than it was a half century ago. But the
challenge is “how to overcome self-imposed obstacles that prevent
improvements in knowledge and capabilities from generating intensive growth
that outruns the accumulation of resources” (p. 823).

I greatly enjoyed this work, as much as the first volume. The research is
incisive, clearly presented, and the volume is very cogently organized. At
one point I wondered how the second volume might have been improved if the
contributors had read or paid more attention to the first. I say this
because second-volume contributors sometimes had contradictory different
perspectives about pre-modern Chinese culture and socio-economic ideas, and
this is an important topic given the stereotype of “Oriental Despotism”
that economic historians are—or should be—trying to wash out of their
clothes. Some discussion on the future impact relating to demographics
(e.g., age, population, fertility) might also have been relevant and
helpful.

Whatever the case, we stand in a very privileged position to be able to
learn many lessons from such massive and historic economic system(s), and
both volumes deserve a wide reading.



Dr. Jamin Andreas Hübner is a faculty member at the University of the
People and a research fellow at LCC International University. He is a
scholar of religion and economics, as well as an activist, and
organizational leader, and is currently writing a book on cooperative
economics.

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