Trends in the Late Qing and Republican Rural Economy: Reality or Illusion?

Trends in the Late Qing and Republican Rural Economy: Reality or Illusion? by Thomas B. Wiens Two decades after Ramon Myers (1970) offered a controversial challenge to the conventional wisdom on the trends in the Chinese rural economy during the Republican period, three new books join the fray.I These share with Myers the merit of exploring new sources of information, and the demerit of stretching fragmentary and conflicting evidence over a weak superstructure of grand design (Wiens, 1975). Each study seeks to add an epitaph to the tombstone of a bygone era--Rawski and Brandt to glorify the deceased, and Huang to recount the failures. The key uncertainties surrounding the period concern the economic trends--there is broad concurrence among these and other authors on what might be called the "statics" of the Republican period. However, a close reading of the three postmortems does not cause me to change an earlier conclusion that "the quality of Chinese statistical data in this period was too weak to provide definitive evidence on dynamic trends..." (Wiens, 1982). Four major works--by Tawney (1932), Buck (1956), Liu and Yeh (1965 and Perkins (1969)--have defined the accepted "static" picture of the Chinese rural .socio-economy in the Republican period as one several degrees removed from subsistence agriculture (indeed, quite commercialized in many areas). Insofar as these works attempt to generalize about dynamic trends, they do not imply that rural China was either "developing" or "declining", Le., that rural per capita income was growing or falling on average and over a long period. The three new books do see trends--Rawski and Brandt argue that rural per capita incomes on average were increasing at 63 significant rates. Huany, in contrast, sees a trend to increasing commercialization and intensification of economic activity occurring within overall stagnation of per capita incomes. The question to be examined below is whether these findings are really supported by the evidence, or are a product of faulty inference. RAWSKI Rawski's work is to prewar industrial development as Perkins' work is to agriculture--detailed, thorough and largely convincing. He accepts the view that "the warlord period of China's history was not merely an era of fruitless strife, but rather a period of transition which witnessed changes so significant that without them the unification and modernization of China currently being undertaken would be impossible." That is, the impact of warlordism was not overwhelming to the economy--although by creating uncertainty it did minimize long-term investment, which of course is the stuff of which economic development is made. Rawski demonstrates both that long term modem sector growth rates in China were comparable to those in Japan, and also the existence of an industrial structure dependent on agricultural raw materials which was similar to those of other developing countries today, and was not particularly enclave-oriented or overwhelmed by foreign investment. The theory that treaty ports, unequal treaties and foreign domination together handicapped Chinese industrial development finds no support here. Nevertheless, growth was from very tiny aggregates, and the size of the sector by 1935 remained small compared to 1apan and weak in the producer goods sector. The overall analysis of growth in industrial, financial, transport and communications capacity to my mind establishes convincingly that forces which should have led to increasing 64 rural commercialization were indeed in operation. For each sector, Rawski is careful to supplement solid quantitative analysis for the modern sector with enough fragmentary evidence to suggest that the traditional sector was not squeezed out, but on the contrary, perhaps grew as a whole. I find much to envy in his ability to muster evidence, even when indirect inference is required. Where Rawski gets into issues directly relating to rural development, he also scores some points. For example, he makes an unassailable case that prewar taxation, on average, was low by whatever criterion one might use to judge it--Iess than 5% of GNP, at least prior to the mid-1930s. At the same time he acknowledges that particular localities, even provinces, may have paid much higher taxes, and that at times taxes may indeed have caused distress; he is also cautious on the issue of the relative...