井底之蛙

Yuyu Chen, Ginger Zhe Jin and Yang Yue are all economists and they are doing interesting work on rural-urban migration in China. Given that China has better registration of its rural population than places like Mexico it is a good place to look at migration patterns. They find that people from the same village tend to go to the same places, and even congregate in the same jobs. They attribute this to social networks, which make it easier and easier for people to go someplace once more and more of their compatriots are there.

This is of course not surprising to anyone familiar with Chinese migration in the past. Honig and Goodman, among many others, have written about how native-place ties structured migration and sojourning.  Chen et. al., don’t compare this migration to earlier ones, which for a historian would seem to point to lots of interesting questions. I was also very surprised that they keep calling their area of study “China.” Their stats come from 8 counties. Are they all in the same region (or macro-region)? From different regions and they are assuming you can draw conclusions about “China” from them? Its an interesting paper, but in addition to proving some important stuff it also shows that economists are not like you and me.¹

Via Brad DeLong

see

1. Yes, I know, they have more money. [↩]

With Obama in China lots of websites want to say something about China and What It All Means. For example, The Atlantic has a post by Patrick Chovanic that describes the Nine Nations of China, dividing China into nine separate regions, rather than viewing it as a monolithic whole. As Jeremiah Jenne points out this is such a good idea that William Skinner published a similar map back in 1977. Skinner’s macro-regions have become one of the old standbys of China studies (since before I was in school.)

I think Jeremiah is being a bit too kind here in praising Chovanic for popularizing Skinner’s work, and Chovanic is a bit off-base in claiming that Skinner’s work “reached similar conclusions” to his. If you read Chovanic’s descriptions of the regions he is trying, I think, to present the idea that each of these different areas has its own “animating force or character that defines each region.” This sound very fuzzy, and it is not fair to Skinner to compare his methodical work on economic and cultural patterns with data from  “personal experience traveling, living, and doing business in those places.” More importantly, Skinner did not see his regions as necessarily having different characters.¹ As Esherick and Little pointed out in the Journal of Asian Studies in 1986 this is exactly what Skinner’s model does not do. ² Skinner was interested in, among other things, in relations between core and peripheral counties inside the individual regions. Beijing -should- seem a lot like Shanghai in some respects because they are both top-level urban areas in their region. Chovanic seems to be suggesting that the only important distinctions are between individual regions. I’m not really sure this is helful at all. Skinner’s work had flaws, but it was remarkably robust, yeilding insights into what happened in China from well back into imperial times and forward to the present. Chovanic’s descriptions don’t even go back past 1980. Was the Northeast a “a Rust Belt of decaying industries with no future.” in the Qing or the Republic? Although the maps look similar, there is really not much in common between the two projects.

1. Skinner argues that the economic geography of traditional China is best understood as a set of relatively distinct regions: nine “macroregions” defined by physiography and marketing hierarchies. Each macroregion is a functionally integrated rural-urban system with a relatively densely populated lowland core and a peripheral hinterland. The functional organization of each macroregion is constituted by the marketing hierarchies that link villages, market towns, and cities. Macroregions are distinct from one another; they are separated by relatively sharp boundaries defined by the orientation of local marketing systems. The factors that influence the shape and identity of each macroregion are economic-largely the constraints of transport cost. Thus Skinner provides a framework in terms of which to analyze the distribution of cities, transportation networks, trade networks, and so forth. This framework constitutes Skinner’s central thesis about the economic geography of China. He offers this thesis, however, in the context of a larger research hypothesis: that noneconomic phenomena (such as the spread of heterodox movements and rebellions, the structure of the imperial bureaucracy  and the cultural horizon of the peasant) are better understood when placed within the spatial framework of macroregions. This research hypothesis is of necessity less specific than the central thesis, for Skinner is fully aware of the many diverse factors that influence these noneconomic phenomena. Nonetheless the extended research hypothesis has stimulated much fruitful work on a wide range of phenomena. [summary from Esherick and Little] [↩]
2. Daniel Little and Joseph W. Esherick “Testing the Testers: A Reply to Barbara Sands and Ramon Myers’s Critique of G. William Skinner’s Regional Systems Approach to China” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Feb., 1989), pp. 90-99 [↩]

Great Leap Forward era backyard iron furnaces have been unearthed [via] and there is discussion about whether to preserve them as historical evidence, even a cultural heritage. The site is described thus

The backyard furnaces are located on the south slope of a hillside within the borders of Heiyaodong Village in Baiyin Mongolian Township, Sunan Yugur Autonomous County. They are situated in an east-west line and number 159 furnaces in total, most of which have crumbled. About fifty are still largely intact. The largest is 8 meters high and 14 meters in circumference; the smallest is 2.5 meters high and 2.7 meters around. Most are pagoda-shaped, with one or more chimneys. Their insides are lined with clay bricks. Some of the larger furnaces are dug into the hillside and have one or more arched entrances for feeding raw material, lighting the fire, or cleaning out slag, and multiple air vents are set into the floor. Some are made up of ten individual furnaces joined together. The whole group extends for a more than two kilometers, making for an impressive sight. The furnaces were built in 1958 during the Great Leap Forward and ceased operating in 1960. Some of them were never put to use.

That last line captures what is, for me anyway, the essence of the GLF: an immense waste of effort, resources, lives. Wu Zuolai of the journal Theory and Criticism of Art and Literature writes:

People who experienced that time recall that whole forests were cut down to make charcoal to burn, bringing immense disaster to the environment. And because some areas were unable to produce acceptable steel, the people had to break apart their cooking pots and melt them down in the furnaces, and as a result, unusable lumps of iron were all that was produced. One unforeseen consequence was that real cultural heritage was plundered during the steel production campaign. The two-storey tower at the famous Hangu Pass* was torn down, and inscriptions accumulated over the course of two thousand years were destroyed. Wuwei County,* Gansu, was an important northwestern garrison in the Tang Dynasty, and its city wall, built of large bricks, towered for a thousand years. But those thousand-year-old bricks became part of the furnaces.
…
The past has become a memory and a historical lesson. But has the mentality of the Great Leap Forward been entirely eradicated? Faced with this massive cluster of iron smelters, we have much to reflect upon. Public, scientific, and democratic decision making must not be merely empty words but must be put into practice in every project.

Wu goes on to suggest a “small museum” on the site, and an oral history and records collecting project. Given that this is one of the landmark events of modern Chinese history, I would hope for that much, or more. But given that this is one of the landmark events in the failure of Maoist policy and rapid modernization, I have my doubts.

Robert Bickers has a nice post up at China Beat on the early history of Qingdao beer. Its a good post and sheds a lot of light on the early history of what is now probobably one of the best known Chinese brands. Before WWI Qingdao was a classic example of the nature of Anglo-German capitalism in China. What I find most interesting about Qingdao however is its post 1949 history. There were lots of capitalist corporations in China before 1949, but not many of them made it through the Maoist period. Yang Zhiguo has studied the history of Qingdao brewery after 1949.¹ During the Maoist years Qingdao was China’s capitalist face, sort of the first Special Economic Zone, since China needed foreign exchange and one of the few ways to get it was by selling Qingdao beer in  Southeast Asia and above all in Hong Kong. Hong Kong was of course a free market city and Qingdao had to take on already established foreign brands. This led to importing foreign machinery, a focus on quality that was unheard of in Maoist production, and killing domestially popular lines like Qingdao Porter (no really) in favor of the standard export version. As China began to open up after 1976 Qingdao was one of the first Chinese branded products to be exported in part because everyone likes beer but also because it was one of the only Chinese products with any hope of competing on world markets. My students are always amazed to hear that in the early 1980s some Americans (like me) would point it out to their friends if they found a product on a store shelf that said “Made in P.R.China”.²  Qingdao was the face of Chinese capitalism in the West for a number of years. Even now it is the face of Chinese beer, given that the other options would be something like the dreadful Reeb.

1. “This Beer Tastes Really Good”: Nationalism, Consumer Culture and Development of the Beer Industry in Qingdao, 1903-1993 The Chinese Historical Review 14.1 Spring 2007 [↩]
2. This is less rare now [↩]

In a recent speech Zhou Xiaochuan gave a nice clear summary of the reasons for Asian economic exceptionalism and the cultural (and therefore apparently mostly unchangeable) roots of China’s current high savings rate. He is doing this for contemporary political reasons of course, trying to claim that the Chinese government cannot change the savings rate. I’m not as interested in that debate, but this is a nice resource for anyone teaching East Asia and looking for a good, recent, official summary of a fairly cultural determinist vision of China’s rise.

Tradition, cultural, family structure, and demographic structure and stage of economic development are the major reasons for high savings ratio in the East Asia. First, the East Asia countries are influenced by Confucianism, which value thrift, self-discipline, zhong yong or Middle Ground (low-key), and anti-extravagancy. Second, we may be able to trace the cultural differences from a large number of textbooks and literature of different countries. For instance, the Latin American countries have similar levels of national wealth as the East Asian countries but lower savings ratios. This can be attributed to the cultural differences in the region, where people have a higher propensity of consumption and tend to quickly use up all their salaries. Third, family tie is strong in the East Asian countries, and families shoulder social responsibilities such as providing for the elderly and bringing up children. Fourth, according to the Life Cycle Hypothesis by Franco Modigliani, more money is saved to meet future pension and healthcare needs as the share of working age population increases. When we study the phases of economic growth, in times of exceptionally high economic growth, most of the incremental income will be saved, resulting in an unusually high savings ratio. China fits in the above-mentioned two conditions for a high savings ratio. Japan and the U.S. can also demonstrate the contribution of these factors in determining savings ratio. Similar to the U.S., Japan is a developed country with high per capita income. The social security systems in the two countries have their respective weaknesses. However, Japan’s savings ratio is much higher than that in the U.S. This can be largely ascribed to cultural, family value and demographic feature in Japan, which are fairly similar to those in other East Asian countries.

via TNR

Historians write a lot about taxes, in part because we are often interested in states and what they do, and taxes are something that states do a lot of. Taxation also generates a lot of sources, since before you can tax things you need to figure out where they are and who owns them. From the Domesday Book to various cadastral surveys states have tried to generate paper about their subjects, subjects have resisted, and historians have been interested in both the resistance and the paper.

In Nanjing in 1609 there were major tax protests, only in this case protesters were asking the government to impose a new tax.¹ Not only did they want to be taxed, they were offering to compile the tax rolls for the state.

we volunteer to compile a book on the exact share for each household, rich or poor, in the year of 1608. Every pu (the neighborhood unit for the huojia system) will meet together to collect and compile this information into a list named Wucheng puce (the neighborhood almanac for the Nanjing Five Districts) and together we will send it to the government to be used as an official reference.

This makes a nice opening for an article, because it is pretty weird behavior. Not surprisingly the citizens of Nanjing wanted to be taxed for a good reason, namely that the new cash tax was to replace an old labor tax that they found more onerous and less flexible. Fei is interested in the case primarily because it shows a lot about public opinion in the Ming and how the state used and reacted to it.

I bring this up partly because it is an interesting article but mostly because issue 28.2 of Late Imperial China is now available to anyone with a web browser. So you should go read it and then subscribe.

1. Fei, Siyen. ” We Must be Taxed: A Case of Populist Urban Fiscal Reform in Ming Nanjing, 1368–1644″
   Late Imperial ChinaVolume 28, Number 2, December 2007
   [↩]

I don’t post much about current affairs¹ but the current Chinese stimulus package seems worth talking about. To forestall the possibility of an economic downturn, China is planning a Rmb4,000bn ($586bn) stimulus package. This number may be a bit exagerated, but that is still a lot of simoleons. If this does come about it will be a pretty decisive shift in Chinese policy. Partly it will be China really becoming the world financial leader it would like to be. One reason they are announcing it now is to have something to brag about at the upcoming G20 meetings. More importantly, though, it may been seen in the future as a decisive point where China turned to domestic demand to drive its economy. This has been going on for a while, of course, but this seems an important new step. It also seems like a good time to retro-fit a social safety net. The money is supposed to go to “low-income housing, rural infrastructure, roads, airports, water, electricity, the environment and technological innovation” at least some of which seems to indicate that the cash may be used to fix some of the festering problems of rapid growth. Who knows where the money will end up, of course, and there are some bad signs here (like an emphasis on trying to continue the real estate boom). The plan supposedly “offers an opportunity to push forward the long-waited revision of oil and natural gas prices by linking them with global markets.” Raising gas prices would not be very stimulative, but apparently the idea is if Beijing is handing out all this money it would be a good time to quit subsidizing gas prices. Half a trillion dollars is a lot of money, and spending it will give Beijing a good chance to show what sort of economy they want to be running ten years from now and the extent to which they would like that economy to be run from Beijing.

1. despite what they do to our hit counts [↩]

Apparently China produces a lot of cement

From the Oil Drum, via Andrew Sullivan, Another in our series of cool teaching graphics.

For people who have read Sherman Cochran it is not news that Chinese merchants developed brand names and consumers developed brand loyalty. Cochran mostly focuses on an earlier period (and the medicine business) but Lang Jing looks at the athletic shoe industry.¹ Lang is looking at the development of modern athletics in Shanghai. One issue he looks at is how widespread interest in modern athletics was outside of schools and national competitions and such. This is always a hard thing to find out about, but he does show that there must have been some market for Western-style sports in China, as Shanghai had a number of manufacturers of ping-pong equipment, basketballs (basketball assimilated quickly in China) and of course athletic shoes. It was in the shoe industry of course that you see advertising wars. 金刚 (jin gang)² brand shoes ran ads in the 1940s urging consumers ”勿相信牌子，相信你自己的眼睛“ (don’t trust brand names trust your own eyes) Presumably meaning they should not be taken in by advertising hype. The target of these adds was of course 回力 (Hui Li, Returning Strength), the kingpin of the Chinese shoe industry. The campaign seems to have worked, as 金刚 became a major player in athletic shoes. Perhaps it did not work well enough, however, since 回力 is still around and they are not. 回力has an interesting logo, as you can see below. I don’t think Nike can sue them however, since 回力 has been fighting sneaker wars far longer than Nike has even existed.

1. 郎淨 “近代體育在上海(1840-1937)” 上海社會 2006 p.361 [↩]
2. Golden Exactly? its hard to translate. It’s also the word used for King Kong [↩]

The Needham Question is hot, hot, hot! Thanks to Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom¹, everyone who’s everyone is talking about China’s “failure” in the face of Western intellectual and technological revolutions.

While it’s kind of nice to see a China scholar like Needham getting the pop culture treatment, and the questions he raised are still worth pursuing, the reviews suggest that the emphasis on “Eccentric” is pretty severe. They also suggest that Winchester’s biographical emphasis has left him with the wrong impression about the body of work which Needham’s intellectual descendants still do. Andrew Leonard writes:

In the epilogue, Winchester asserts that the consensus opinion of current Sinologists is that “China, basically, stopped trying.” That’s too facile a summation when one is writing a biography of a man who devoted his entire life to understanding why China failed to capitalize on thousands of years of scientific and technological innovation. Winchester then skips through the main contending theories that attempt to explain China’s failure: China’s bureaucracy siphoned talent away from a potentially entrepreneurial merchant class, China did not have the spur to competition that Europe’s many warring states inflicted on each other, China’s totalitarian government quashed initiative.

In fact, as I wrote in response to Winchester’s NYT op-ed²:

This is a rehashing of old views of China that inspired the great “Needham Question”³: “Why didn’t China have a Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution”? Half a century of scholarship has produced a massive aggregation of knowledge about science and technology in China which shows, among other things, that scientific and technical progress continued throughout the early modern period (which, started a half millenium earlier in China than in the West) but that China’s population obviated the need for the kind of massive “labor saving” capital equipment, so industrial production moved in other directions.

China was also experiencing a scientific flourishing in the Qing era, featuring fields from philology to botany.⁴

China doesn’t “fall behind” until around 1800, when the steam power revolution put England a quantum leap ahead of the pack. It then went through about 150 years of political turmoil in which economic and technical development often took a back seat to other issues, including imperialism, uprisings, revolutions, warlords…. [ellipsis in original; it's a bad habit]

The assumption that the Western model is “natural” or somehow inevitable unless someone “fails” to achieve it is patently absurd. Europe spent centuries in the shadow of the rest of the world before catching up in their Early Modern age (with the aid of a lot of imported Chinese technology), and finally, as Paul Kennedy (among others) argued, pulling ahead due to competitive pressures and (in the case of the British steam revolution) a certain amount of luck.

The upshot of the Needham tradition scholarship, as I understand it, is that it was more macroeconomic and political problems than technological skills which resulted in China’s “lost ground” in the modern age, but a significant component of it was historical contingency (or “dumb luck,” as we used to say). Nothing inevitable about it, and nothing fundamental. China wasn’t the only great Early Modern empire to flounder in the modern age — in fact, it was more the norm than the exception, as the Ottomans, Russians, Mughals, Iberians and Hapsburgs show. “The West” wasn’t a terribly coherent entity — especially not organizationally! — and contrasting “it” with China without a little consciousness of the internal tensions, backwards regions, and failures contained within the Western tradition makes no sense, intellectually, historically or politically.

1. is that subtitle a 19th century classic, or what? [↩]
2. Which my colleague, Alan Baumler, aptly dismissed with “Don’t get me started.” [↩]
3. I did not, when I wrote this, realize that Winchester was the author of a Needham biography [↩]
4. The term kaozheng escaped me until later [↩]