The Chinese Market Economy, 1000–1500 by William Guanglin Liu (review)

This is a book on one of the most important periods of Chinese economic history. The half millennium from 1000 to 1500 witnessed China's rise as a commercial superpower in the world under the Song (960–1279), to a disgraceful colony under brutal Mongol rule (1279–1368)—after a four-decade heroic military resistance by the Chinese (by far the longest by any victim country of the Mongol invasions and conquests)—and to a slow but fruitful recovery from horrific socio-economic injuries inflicted by the Mongols to achieve a cultural and economic renaissance during the Ming (1368–1644).

The book has in all eight chapters under four umbrellas: (1) motivations, (2) the Song economy, (3) the Ming economy, and (4) agriculture during both the Song and Ming. Chapters One and Two are devoted to issues of methodology and a review of the existing literature. They help to justify the periodization of the book.

Chapters Three to Five deal with the Song economy. The deliberation begins with the size of the population in Song China and then moves to trade and transport infrastructure (such as waterways). Somehow, however, the actual scale and scope of the Song commercial sector—regarding market locations, commercialization, capital investment in industry and services, labor employment patterns, urbanization rates, and new technology—remain unclear. Instead, the author provides the reader with information on some very specific aspects of the Song economy, which may not lead to a general picture of a medieval commercial superpower. However, a real contribution has been made in Chapter Five in terms of how the Song commercial advancement came to a full stop. The author rightly blames the Mongol conquest. Instead of repeating the prevailingly conventional romantic image of the Pax Mongolica, which has been seen as progressive and tolerant towards religions, ethnicity, and trade, the author convincingly shows the evil side of Mongol rule, a Dark Age in China's history littered with hatred, destruction, and racial discrimination.

Chapter Six discusses recovery of the Chinese economy from the Dark Age of Mongol rule and explains why and how the command economy gained the upper hand in Ming decision-making as a rational choice in order to rebuild the economy. The author indicates that the national priorities during the early Ming were food and employment. It was highly rational, therefore, for the Ming state to practice physiocracy, or "agricultural fundamentalism." The new policy certainly worked, as can be seen from the fast recovery of the Chinese population.

Chapters Seven and Eight are again about agriculture but stay geographically confined within the Yangzi Delta and cover both the Song and Ming periods. Here, the author seems to abandon the vital issue of the market economy central to the book's title, although there is a systematic handling of various agricultural estimates.

Overall, this volume bears two principal characteristics: first, the main emphasis is the Ming story of economic recovery; and second, the causes, process, scale, and scope of the market economy in China remain tacit. The author promotes the idea that Song China was a Golden Age of sophisticated growth in a traditional economy, something that did not recur until the end of the twentieth century under Deng Xiaoping. The Ming period was merely a period of recovery in the farming sector. The evidence depends heavily on government sources and on a national scale which deserves credit, given the current, and often misleading, trend of "data reconstruction" for China and elsewhere. Therefore, the reader will find the super-long appendices (pp. 207–91) and bibliography very helpful for scholarly references to many issues in the field of Chinese economic history of premodern times.