Chinese development before 1300 falls beyond the scope of our investigation. For our purposes suffice to say that available evidence, including Elvin’s, gives credibility to Christopher Chase-Dunn’s and Thomas Hall’s contention that capitalism “nearly occurred first” in Song China. [43] As previously noted, tendencies that became typical of the European capitalist path in the “extended” sixteenth century were already present in China under the Song and the Yuan. Be that as it may, the slowdown in Chinese growth after 1300 can be interpreted as a first entrapment in a high level equilibrium–as Smith himself appears to do when he claims that China “had perhaps, even long before [Marco Polo’s] time, acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its laws and institutions permits it to acquire.” [44]
This interpretation, however, clashes with the remarkable economic growth that Sugihara calls the “Chinese miracle” of the eighteenth century. Major differences in the man-land ratio between the core regions of East Asia and those of Western Europe before 1800—claims Sugihara—were both cause and effect of an unprecedented and unparalleled East Asian Industrious Revolution. By developing labor-absorbing institutions and labor-intensive technologies in response to natural resource constraints (especially scarcity of land), East Asian states experienced a major increase in population accompanied, not by a deterioration, but by a modest improvement in the standard of living. This escape from Malthusian checks was especially remarkable in China, whose population had previously risen several times to a ceiling of 100-150 million only to fall, whereas by 1800 it rose to nearly 400 million. “This was clearly a world demographic landmark and its impact on world GDP far outweighed that of post-industrial revolution Britain, whose share of world GDP in 1820 was less than 6 percent.” The “Chinese miracle” was replicated on a smaller territorial scale in Japan, where population growth was less explosive than in China but the improvement in standard of living more significant. [45]
As figure 1 shows, the East Asian share of world GDP did in fact increase further for almost half a century after the beginning of the British Industrial Revolution. If China had entered a stationary state ca. 1300 or earlier, what accounts for this new upswing of economic growth? Did the state-and-national-economy-making activities of the Ming and early Qing, and the rise under the latter of “an essentially new type of rural society,” not help at all in freeing China from the high-level equilibrium trap?
Three considerations help in answering these questions. First, the tendency of labor-intensive economic growth to get stuck in a high-level equilibrium trap does not rule out the existence of even higher equilibria, attainable through suitable changes in the geographical and institutional environment in which the economy is embedded. Second, the eighteenth-century Chinese economic “miracle” can best be interpreted as a shift of the economy from a high to an even higher equilibrium, due primarily to changes in the institutional and geographical environment brought about by Ming and Qing policies. Third, despite this upward shift, market-based development in China moved in a different direction than in Europe, becoming less, rather than more, capitalist in orientation.
The capitalist character of market-based development is not determined by the presence of capitalist institutions and dispositions but by the relation of state power to capital. Add as many capitalists as you like to a market economy, but unless the state has been subordinated to their class interest, the market economy remains non-capitalist. [46] Fernand Braudel himself takes imperial China as the example that “most opportunely supports [his] insistence on separating the market economy and capitalism.” Not only did China “have a solidly-established market economy... with its chains of local markets, its swarming population of small artisans and itinerant merchants, its busy shopping streets and urban centers.” In addition, the merchants and bankers of Shanxi province and the overseas Chinese originating from Fujian and other southern coastal provinces closely resembled the business communities that constituted the preeminent capitalist organizations of sixteenth century Europe. And yet, the state’s “unmistakable hostility to any individual making himself ‘abnormally’ rich” meant that “there could be no capitalism, except within certain clearly-defined groups, backed by the state, supervised by the state and always more or less at its mercy.”
): "...are we not then, to improve on human nature?". If people realised this essential truth that we're not slaves of our nature 200 years ago, why do you insist we're still slaves to it even now?
