Japan, China, and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850-1949 (review)

This important cluster of perspectives on the growth of the Asian international economy originates from a 1993 workshop held in Osaka on the role of China and overseas Chinese networks in the Asian international economy. It is the first volume in the series of "Japanese Studies in Economic and Social History" edited by Osamu Saito and Kaoru Sugihara. As the title suggests, this book does not deal with issues concerning commodity production and consumption; it focuses instead on matters of commodity distribution and movement of people within and across national boundaries in Asia. The book also addresses such issues as monetary system and tariff policy as they had a clear bearing on regional distribution of commodities.

This collection comprises four parts. Part I looks at the history of interactions between the Japanese and the Chinese cotton textile industries. The themes that emerge from the essays of Kazuko Furuta, Naoto Kagotani, and Takeshi Abe are that Chinese merchants were actively involved in intra-regional trade as early as the 1870s, that Chinese and Indian merchants remained vital in the development of a higher-range market of cotton textiles in Asia during the 1920s and early 1930s, and that exports of Japanese cotton cloth to China expanded rapidly during World War I and the 1920s owing in part to the effective organization of the Japanese cotton industry.

Part II examines the decline of the old Chinese monetary system and the Nationalist movements and policies and how the latter two developments affected trade. Akinobu Kuroda's analysis shows how forces tending toward monetary integration destroyed provincial autonomy by the 1920s. The changes constituted a transformation of China's existing monetary system as currency circuits (defined as a system of currency circulation based on agreements made between private merchants, pp. 105–106) were replaced by the issuance of currencies by banks and other official institutions. Harumi Goto-Shibata's account of Japanese and British perceptions of Chinese boycotts of Japanese goods from 1928 to 1931 suggests that the boycotts were used as a means to put pressure on Sino-Japanese negotiations as well as a tool for developing China's national industries. Toru Kubo's treatment of the tariff policy of the Chinese Nationalist government during the early 1930s reveals that, after recovering tariff autonomy, the Nationalist government realized its dual objectives of revenue generation and industry protection through several revisions of import duties from 1928 to 1934.

Part III discusses the patterns of China's internal integration and its relationship with the international economy. Man-houng Lin's analysis of the evolution of China's dual economy (defined in terms of the dichotomy between a Core China consisting of the hinterland of treaty ports and areas within 50–75 miles from railways or rivers and a Peripheral China which is the opposite of Core China, p. 180) in international trade relations from the 1840s to the 1940s suggests that a dual economy had developed between the 1850s and the 1870s. By the latter half of the 1930s, the overwhelming majority of spinning machines, flour factories, tobacco companies, and electrical–chemical factories were located in the coastal provinces. The coastal areas were also the most active in foreign trade. In fact, the Nationalist government derived 95 percent of its revenue from industrial and commercial taxes from Core China (p. 191). Hajime Kose's study of China's regional commodity flows from 1914 to 1931 reveals that internal trade grew almost as fast as foreign trade during this period. In addition, although the proportion of domestic goods in regional imports increased in almost all regions, about two-thirds of this internal trade was made up of foreign goods.

Part IV explores the movement of commodities as well as people between China and Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Man-houng Lin's discussion of Taiwan merchants involved in China trade from 1895 to 1937 shows that...