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History And Economics Notes Chinese Economic History Since 1850 Notes

Week 6 Lecture Notes

Updated Week 6 Lecture Notes Notes

Chinese Economic History Since 1850 Notes

Chinese Economic History Since 1850

Approximately 215 pages

These notes and other materials cover the EH207: The Making of an Economic Superpower: China since 1850.

"This course provides a survey of long-term economic change in China from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It focuses on China's long path to becoming a major global economic power at the beginning of the new millennium. The course examines the importance of ideological and institutional change in bringing about economic transformations by surveying major historical turning points s...

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Chinese Economic History Since 1850 Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

State, Society and Market

  • State and commercial organization developed alongside each other in the long-run

  • Guilds were an important social organization

    • John Major encountered problems in the Lower Yangzi with them

    • Silk weaver guild destroyed Chen Qiyuan’s factory in Guangdong

      • Guilds overlapped with lineage

  • The problem was not that the State caused actively damaged prosperity

    • The bigger problem was they didn’t do enough

The Problem of Traditional Chinese Commercial Organization

  • “Chinese people are like loose sand” (Sun Zhongshan)

    • Founding father of Modern China

    • Like many revolutionaries, Sun spent a lot of time overseas

  • The lack of social cohesion meant revolution and modernization were difficult

  • Civic identity was important, but was not organized nationally

    • Social organization was organized along family lines

    • Migrant merchants were attached to their hometowns not their trading city

  • Guild and other organizations were “feudal powers”

    • Searched for monopoly and rents

      • A fundamental feature of guilds

    • Often overlapped with lineage and family

  • Weber – A sociologist who invested the Chinese culture and lineage

  • Secret societies were another important social group

    • Dynastic leaders were weary of them

  • Commerce as a profession was ranked bottom, below handicrafts

    • In contrast to the West, where mercantilism was fundamental to Western ideology

      • E.g. East India Company

    • Lack of commercial and contractual law made it difficult for large scale firms to become established

  • What were the problems of family firm?

    • There was no distinction between public and private

    • Corruption and nepotism

    • Difficult to transcend beyond your individual households

    • Capital accumulation and pooling of capital was limited to close circles and your lineage

Traditional View of the Problem of Accounting in China

  • Rational accounting was the primary factory in the development of modern Western capitalism (Weber and Sombart)

  • Italian “double-entry” allowed:

    • Corporate form of organization

    • Separation between public and private assets

  • Arabic numerals were systematic

    • Chinese numeral system didn’t have place notations

  • Absence of calculating capital investment

Revisionist View of Accounting and Commerce in China

  • The Chinese mercantile network was widespread in Southeast Asia

    • Huff notes that Singapore is the place where Chinese and English entrepreneurs met

    • Dominant in Yokohama in late Tokugawa and early Meiji

  • The Japanese Meiji revolution was a response to Chinese mercantile power as well as to Western challenge

  • There was a symbiosis in the treaty ports between the Chinese and West

  • There was a rise of Chinese industrialists in the 1920s

  • Although there was no formal laws, there was a widespread contractual culture

  • There was in fact widespread use of accounting at all levels

    • The abacus and Chinese numeral system worked very efficiently together

    • Account books were used for households, lineage entities, firms and the state

What is the Reality of Commerce in China

  • Must compare Chinese business organizations on their own terms, not set against Western standards

  • Chinese business organizations were vastly shaped by historical, political and social factors

  • They were far more flexible and fluid than we recognize

  • They responded to market incentives, had some corporate features and were quite rational given the constraints

  • They were more viable and enduring than expected

  • As an example of the importance of money to Chinese, they burned money when people died as they believed they needed it to survive in the afterlife

  • Possibly had a fairly integrated market for...

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