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China: What Was Going on in 1870?; or, Why Was the
Twentieth Century Not a Chinese Century?
J. Bradford DeLong
U.C. Berkeley
,
NBER
, and WCEG
July 21, 2018
<
https://www.icloud.com/pages/0pebTWadZO0frIs90_JSUKMnw
>
Kong Shangren
(1699)
:
1
White glass from across the Western Seas
Is imported through Macao:
Fashioned into lenses big as coins,
They encompass the eyes in a double frame.
I put them on—it suddenly becomes clear;
I can see the very tips of things!
And read fi ne print by the dim-lit window
Just like in my youth
…
Th
e
most interesting thing
was
not that the world was poor in 1870: the world had
always been poor since the invention of agriculture. The interesting things were
that a part of the world was just starting to become rich
—
and
it was interesting
which part was becoming rich.
That part of the world was starting to become rich
was odd.
And that t
he technological and organizational edge of human civilization
in 1870 was the North Atlantic
rather than, say, China
was distinctly odd.
1: Britons: Too Ignorant to Make Good Slaves
Two thousand years before 1870, people would have laughed at the idea at Britain
as a leading economic power.
The fi rst-century BCE Roman military-politician
Gaius Julius Caesar thought that
the Britons as among the most backward people he had ever conquered. When
Marcus Tullius Cicero learned that Caesar was planning to invade Britain, his
reaction was to snark to his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus. Caesar’s invasion of
1
Britain was completely pointless. Not an ounce of silver that could be stolen was to
be found on the entire island. All that a Roman politician on the make could gain
from an invasion of Britain was slaves—and not very good-quality slaves at that.
Certainly nobody could expect from the Britons even a single slave smart and well-
educated enough to have a useful skill like literacy or musicianship!
2
A thousand years before—in 800, say—the technological and civilizational cutting
edges of humanity were to be found in the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid’s capital of
Baghdad and the Tang Dynast
y
’s Chang’an rather than London or Bristol or
Manchester or New York or Washington or Cleveland. Even three-hundred years
before—in 1570—it would have taken a very sharp-eyed observer indeed to
believe that northwest Europe was about to get its act together in a way that the
Turkish Ottoman civilization around Constantinople, the Moghul Indian
civilization around Delhi, and the Ming Chinese civilization around Beijing could
not.
That the 20th Century was not a Chinese century was distinctly odd in the context
of world history. For three millennia the overwhelming proportion of centuries had
been primarily or at least secondarily “Chinese centuries”. Those who did not feel
that China was in some senses a civilization to be emulated thus betrayed their
ignorance. But by 1870 this was no longer the case.
By 1870, however, the power and technology gradients across world civilizations
were very clear. Real wages in England in 1870 were beginning to be substantially
higher than past averages from the Middle Ages. Real wages in China and India
remained extremely low by any standard. Travelers from western Europe to Asia in
the 1600s and before had been impressed back then not just by the scale of the
empires and the luxurious wealth of their rulers but by the rest of the economy as
well. The scale of operations, the prosperity and industry of the merchant classes,
the good order of the people, and the absence of extraordinary poverty among the
masses frequently struck European observers as worthy of comment as striking
contrasts with back home. But by the 1800s this was no longer true. Travelers’
reports then focused as much on mass poverty and near-starvation as on high-craft
and high-culture luxury. Assessments of the wealth of the court took on a sinister
“orientalist” cast—a cruel corrupt ruling elite that simply did not care about the
2
welfare of the people—when viewed against the background of the poverty of the
masses.
2: What Had Happened to China?
The coming of the technology gradient favoring western Europe was indeed
remarkably late. Before 1800 or so there was very little that European traders could
offer to sell that Chinese consumers would wish to buy. For more than two
thousand years China had been one of the leading, if not the leading civilization on
the planet. It was not that the average standard of living was higher in China:
Malthusian population pressures roughly equalized standards of living around the
world. But China had a higher population density because more effi cient
technologies allowed a given plot of arable land to generate more food, better
craftswork in most industries, a larger class of literati interested in high culture,
and—quite probably—a higher standard of living for the landed and ruling elite.
Before 1800 European trade for Chinese goods was by and large trade of silver for
China-made luxuries. And the transfer of technology flowed from east to west: it is
still unclear to what degree the European development of items like gunpowder,
printing, the compass, and noodles owed to the Chinese example. It is clear that all
of these were known in China before they were known in Europe.
3: China’s Relative Apogee
In the Tang Dynasty years before and the Sung Dynasty years after the year 1000,
China had been the most progressive and innovative civilization in the world:
innovative technologically, organizationally, and militarily. Its population—60
million? 80 million? 100 million?—was one of the most rapidly growing and best-
fed populations in the world, thanks to the development of strains of rice that could
be wet-planted, irrigated, and produce three crops a year in the fertile soil of China
from the Yangtze basin south. China then led the world in non-agricultural
technologies as well. At the start of the seventeenth century the British savant,
politician, and bureaucrat Francis Bacon had marveled at three inventions that he
said had utterly transformed Europe: gunpowder, printing, and the compass. China
had developed all three, and had developed all three before 1000.
3
China in the twelfth century at its pre-industrial relative apogee produced more
iron and saw a greater share of agricultural production sold on markets than Britain
would produce and market in the eighteenth. Zheng He's mid-fi fteenth century
voyages of exploration sailed four times as far with twenty times as many sailors
as Columbus, and could land ten times as many soldiers at Dar es Salaam and
Trincomalee as Cortez would land at Vera Cruz. China had long had the capability
of launching its own “voyages of discovery.” Its governments had chosen not to,
with that one exception. Zheng He’s fleet reached Zanzibar, and touched Africa,
bringing back a giraffe. Annoyed at their treatment by a Sri Lankan king, they
captured him and brought him back to China to make his apology to the emperor.
But the political balance in the Ming court changed, the follow-up expeditions
were cancelled, and the exploration program abandoned.
Trade between China and the rest of Eurasia was overwhelmingly one-way. Places
from India west wanted silks, porcelains, teas, and the other valuable and
lightweight products of the craftworkers of China’s high civilization. In return,
China wanted… silver. Demand for curiosities aside, nothing made in the countries
to China’s east were worth the cost of carrying them to China for what they could
be sold there.
3
China led the world in political organization as well.
The four greatest—by some
average of size and durability—empires of all history were, fourth, the johnny-
come-lately seaborne empire of the British; third, the Persian produced by the
lucky adjacency of the horse-and-rider country of the Iranian plateau and the
agricultural boomland of the Tigris-Euphrates valley; second, the Roman trans-
Mediterranean; and fi rst, the Chinese. Both the Roman and Chinese were launched
more than 2000 years ago. Both fell apart after 650 and 450 years, respectively. In
the case of Rome, the memory and the goal of empire and the name of the founder
echoed down through history, so that even in 1917 George V Windsor called
himself “Caesar of India” (Kaiser-i-Hind), Nikolai II Romanov called himself
“Caesar of All the Russias” (T
sar'
V
sekh
R
osiy
), Wilhelm II Hohenzollern called
himself “German Caesar” (
Deutscher Kaiser
), Karl I Habsburg called himself
“
Kaiser von Österreich
” (Caesar of Austria) and Mehmed VI called himself
“Kaisar-i-Rum” (Caesar of Rome). But nothing like the empire was ever
reestablished.
4
Not so in China. The memory of the Chin-Han empire drove its reestablishment by
the Tang (618-907), the Sung (960-1127 or -1279), the Yuan (1206- or 1279-1368),
the Ming (1368-1644), and, last, the Qing (1644-1912).
No other ruler's writ ran a
third as far or had even a third as large a chance of being obeyed as that of China's
emperor. Tang Dynasty cavalry
had
skirmished with Persians on the shores of the
Aral Sea. The Sung Dynasty river navy was the only military force to even
temporarily stymie Ghengis Khan's Mongols before his descendants took to
fi ghting each other rather than expanding the empire. No pre-industrial central
government anywhere ever managed to match the reach, extent, and power of the
landlord-scholar-bureaucracy mode of domination invented under the Tang and
developed under the Sung. The Sung Dynasty capital, Hangzhou, was before the
Mongol conquest the largest city in the world—larger than Baghdad or
Constantinople or Cordova or Delhi—with perhaps half a million inhabitants: the
closest thing to an economic, cultural, and political capital the twelfth-century
world had.
4: China’s Post-Sung Relative Stagnation
By the second half of the nineteenth century China’s relative apogee was three-
quarters of a millennium past, and the government and the people were in crisis.
The people were in crisis because they were more than three times as numerous as
their predecessors at the pre-industrial apogee, because they were ruled by a
rapacious landed aristocracy, and because progress in agriculture and industry to
counterbalance rising population had been nearly absent for most of the second
millennium. In 1100 the Chinese people were rich, or at least as rich as pre-
industrial peasant societies get. At the start of the second millennium development
of new types of crops and new strains of rice had greatly boosted agricultural
productivity and triggered the centuries-long spread of China’s heartland from the
Yellow River to the Yangtze and further south, to Hunan and Guangzhou.
And
by the second half of the nineteenth century Malthus was having his revenge.
China had fi lled up, with more than 300 million people, which left average farm
sizes less than a third of what they had been three quarters of a millennium before.
The bulk of peasant families were close to the edge. It is virtually certain that the
5
average Chinese peasant family in the second half of the nineteenth century had
less food than its predecessors in the twelfth: think of 1300 calories per person per
day as a rough guess.
The technological dynamism and organizational relative edge that China had
possessed in the twelfth century was gone as well. Chinese producers still had
substantial technological edges in limited industrial segments: high end silk
textiles, high-end porcelain, tea. But there had been little internally-driven
technological progress in any industry for more than half a millennium. And the
bureaucracy that in 1150 had looked effi cient and powerful compared to a Europe
—a place where no king would even think of asking an Earl of Pembroke to
explain anything—by 1870 looked corrupt and incapable.
Why this 750 year relative stagnation is a great mystery. There are many potential
suspects to take the blame as the root cause.
Perhaps the root problem was that emperors, grand secretaries, and landlords
feared their own generals more than they feared their neighbors' soldiers. European
kings, ministers, and landlords sought a strong military to protect them and theirs
against the next William the Conqueror or Friedrich II or Francois I or Napoleon.
In China there was little to fear from outside the empire as long as the Mongols
were kept divided, but a great deal to be feared inside the empire from your own
generals—men like the ninth-century An Lu-Shan or the seventeenth-century
Three Feudatories. Thus the military-industrial-metallurgy-innovation complex
that drove so much of pre-industrial and early-industrial European technological
progress was absent.
Perhaps the root problem was that with triple-cropping rice strains the wet-rice
fi elds were too fertile, the governmental bureaucracy too effective, and the avenues
of establishment-oriented upward mobility to the striving and aggressive too open.
After making a little money the logical next step was to buy some land. Because
the land was rich, because labor was plentiful and cheap, and because the empire
was (most of the time) strong internally, one could live well after turning one's
wealth into land. One could also easily make the important social contacts to pave
the way for one's children to advance further. And one's children could do the most
important thing needed for upward mobility: study the Confucian classics and do
6
well on the examinations: fi rst the local shengyan, then the regional juren, and then
the national jinshi. Those who had successfully written their eight-legged essays
and made proper allusions to and use of the Confucian classics would then join the
landlord-scholar-bureaucrat aristocracy that ruled China and profi ted from the
empire. In the process of preparing for the examinations and mastering the material
needed to do well on them, they would acquire the habits of thought and values of
a Confucian aristocrat landlord-scholar-bureaucrat. Entrepreneurial drive and talent
was thus molded into an orthodox Confucian-aristocratic pattern and harnessed to
the service of the regime and of the landlord class: good for the rents of the
landlords, good for the stability of the government, but possibly very bad indeed
for the long-run development of technology and organization. Carlson (1957)
quotes an imperial edict of 1724 condemning mining as a potential source of
disorder and treason:
[M]iners are easy to recruit but hard to disband. If mining is left to the initiative of
merchants there will be danger of crowds assembling and harboring treachery...
Perhaps the root problem was the absence of a new world rich in resources to
exploit and helpless because of technological backwardness, or the lesser weight
attached to instrumental rationality as a mode of thought, or the absence of
dissenting hidey-holes for ideological unconformity, or the fact that the merchants
and hand-manufacturers of China's cities were governed by landlords appointed by
the central government rather than governing themselves, or that large muscled
animals like oxen and horses turned out to be powerful productive multipliers for
temperate rain-irrigated wheat-based agricultural but not for sub-tropical paddy-
irrigated rice-based agriculture, or some combination of these, or any of a host of
other possibilities over which historians will struggle inconclusively (but
thoughtfully and fruitfully) for the rest of time.
Perhaps there were many root problems.
5: China as of Mid-Nineteenth Century
Whatever the cause, the result was China's extraordinary relative stagnation
through much of the second millennium. The country and region that had been the
world's leader—culturally, economically, organizationally—in 1200 was poor,
7
economically backward, and organizationally decrepit by
1770, and much more so
by
1870.
The poverty struck eighteenth-century British moral philosopher Adam Smith hard,
for in his view China had been for a long time "the richest... most fertile, best
cultivated, most industrious, and most populous" country in which even landless
peasants were relatively rich: “the wages of labour had ever been more than
suffi cient to... enable him to bring up a family.” Smith had a theory as to why the
China he saw in his day—the late eighteenth century—had become poor. Because
China would not trade with outsiders and so learn and adapt their ideas, it was
bound to stagnate: “a country which neglects or despises foreign commerce...
cannot transact the... business which it might do with different laws and
institutions.”
4
A stagnant economy, Smith thought, was headed for desperate
poverty through a Malthusian population crisis. Population would continue to grow
while the economy did not. Without technological progress and with increasing
population “competition... would soon reduce [wages] to this lowest rate which is
consistent with common humanity.” At that lowest rate of wages, children would
be so malnourished as to be easy prey to disease and women's body fat levels
would be so low that ovulation was hit-or-miss.
By 1870 it looked like that Malthusian crisis had arrived. The more than 300
million people of late nineteenth-century China had no mechanized farm
machinery and no industry-produced nitrogen fertilizers. They were crowded into
the wet, arable eastern slice of what is “China” on today's maps, with the median
family of 6 farming perhaps 4 acres at a time when the Radical Republicans were
still hoping to somehow fi nd 40 acres plus a mule for each family of American ex-
slaves. Average adult height was, we think, signifi cantly under fi ve feet.
After 1800 British merchants did discover one commodity besides silver that
Indian producers could supply and that Chinese consumers were eager to buy:
opium. By the end of the 1830s the Chinese government was beginning to worry
about the consequences of opium addiction on the country, and the exchange of
European silver for Chinese goods had turned around: the bulk of the China trade
was the exchange of Chinese silver for Indian-grown opium. The Chinese
government attempted to suppress the opium trade and opium smuggling. The
result was the 1839-1842 "Opium War," in which the British fleet intervened on the
8
side of free trade, the sale of opium, and drug addiction. The British Empire
acquired the then nearly barren island of Hong Kong as a base, European influence
was established in a substantial number of "treaty ports" along the Chinese coast,
and the division of China not into European colonies but into regions in the
"spheres of influence" of different European powers began.
Thus the fi rst iron-hulled ocean-going steamships called on a country where the
government and the economy were in crisis for three reasons:
The fi rst reason is that China
’
s government in the late nineteenth century was the
ethnically Manchurian Qing Dynasty, and the Qing Dynasty was weak because it
had always been weak. It had seized power in the mid-seventeenth century. An
ethnic clan of non-proper-Chinese military adventurers from beyond the Great
Wall, from Manchuria, struck at the moment when the previous Ming Dynasty was
paralyzed by peasant revolts and hamstrung by a run of bad emperors and more-
than-usually-corrupt bureaucrats. The Manchu were unifi ed because they were not
Han Chinese: what Manchu prince or mercenary could expect to long survive a
victory by any alternative faction? The Manchu were weak because they were not
Han Chinese: how many of the 300 million Chinese would give how much loyalty
to a ruling dynasty in which the top places were reserved for others?
It was the classic problem of colonial rule. The Manchus tried to solve it by (a)
presenting themselves as ideal Confucian sage-kings (presenting themselves as
more righteous Confucian rulers than Kung-Fu-Tze himself), (b) giving the
landlords through which they ruled free rein throughout central and southern China
(curbing rapacious landlords in the interest of protecting the Old Hundred names of
China was not on the Qing Dynasty agenda, ever), and (c) opposing all change for
change threatened to cause instability and the Qing Dynasty knew that it was
unstable already.
This worked as a political strategy: the Qing Dynasty had a run of 250 years, and
the last Qing emperor still sat a throne—albeit as a puppet of the Japanese army—
in 1945. But it meant that the kind of national and nationalist appeals that those
who in Japan spoke for the Emperor Meiji or that Mongkut and Chulalongkorn
used to try to preserve the independence of Thailand were impossible for China's
late nineteenth-century government. You cannot rally a people against foreign
9
colonialists with the slogan “revere the emperor and expel the barbarians!” when
for more than 200 years the emperor has defi ned himself as non-Han—as a
barbarian.
Even in the days of its peak strength, the Qing Dynasty found it wise to tolerate
dominant currents of thought that viewed its coming to power as a tragedy and its
rule as profoundly illegitimate. Jonathan Spence's
In Search of Modern China
notes the performances at the court of the Kangxi emperor, the fi rst strong and
long-lived Qing dynasty emperor, of "The Peach-Blossom Fan" by Kong Shangren
—an author still loyal to the previous Ming Dynasty, and hostile to the idea that a
scholar-offi cial could win honor by helping the Manchu conquerors rule China:
“[A]t the play's end, with the Ming resistance in ruins, the lovers agree to take
monastic vows... the surviving virtuous offi cials retreat deep into the mountains to
escape a summons from the Qing that they take up offi ce.”
The second reason that China in the late nineteenth century was in crisis was that
Confucian landlord-bureaucrat-scholar aristocracy through which the Qing
Dynasty ruled was not only potentially disloyal but trained to be incapable. As long
as the Mongols were kept divided through bribes and the ruling dynasty uncorrupt,
no Chinese emperor faced any outside existential military threat. Internal disorder
was the main worry. So the central government had discouraged military skill
among its bureaucrats and notables since the Tang dynasty rebellion of An Lushan,
and discouraged any liking for change—a potential cause of disorder—since the
fi rst Ming dynasty emperor had expelled the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan
in the fourteenth century.
Seventeenth-century China was well aware of growing European technological
developments. Yet neither Kong Shangren nor any of his relatives and descendants
ever thought that the optical glass business was worth studying or researching or
entering or even fi nancing. It was simply not the kind of thing that a Confucian
gentleman would do. One consequence of this lamentable uncuriosity was
extraordinary ignorance about the outside world. During the fi rst Opium War of
1840 the staff of High Commissioner Lin, the Qing plenipotentiary on the spot in
Canton, appears to have debated whether an embargo of rhubarb exports might be
enough all on its own to win the war for China.
10
