TY - JOUR
AU - Kaske, Elisabeth
AB - John Francis Davis, who travelled to China with the Amherst mission in 1816 and later became the second British governor of Hong Kong, observed in 1836 with puzzlement that: The Mandarins are such bad political economists as frequently to prohibit, when there are fears of scarcity, the appropriation of grain to these purposes [to make liquor], being ignorant that, if really required for food, the price would prevent its conversion to the other purpose; and, above all, that such a use of it always maintains a surplus supply which may be resorted to in any case of extremity (J.F. Davis, The Chinese: A General Description of the Empire of China and Its Inhabitants [1836], ii. 359). To put things in perspective, Davis was a liberal proponent of free grain trade against the realities of the British Corn Laws. He approvingly notices the Qing’s policy of tax-free grain imports during times of dearth. But his observation still throws a light on different approaches towards very similar crises: the exorbitant costs of wars (the Napoleonic and White Lotus Wars) fought outside the economic heartlands of the respective empires, and climate calamities such as the Tambora eruption that reduced agricultural production within them. Margherita Zanasi’s new book posits the early 1800s as a turning point of the economic fortunes of the Qing empire as well as in economic thinking. While European thinkers turned to liberalism and hailed consumption and the self-regulating market, Qing officials and intellectuals moved in the opposite direction. Driven by the need to feed an ever-increasing population (dubbed the ‘minsheng mandate’ by the author) and to integrate an ever-diverging empire (which we could dub the ‘empire mandate’ by analogy) within a vastly changing geopolitical environment, Qing thinkers and their Republican successors resorted to emphasising frugality and state intervention. China, thus, offers a case against ‘the neoliberal narrative of economic modernization as a march toward increased reliance on an unregulated market’ (p. 1). The book shows that a self-regulating market had long been a staple of China’s economic thinking, echoing Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing (2009) and denying claims of an a priori Confucian anti-market orthodoxy. As in other cases of late industrialisation, shown in W.W. Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth model, the changed economic environment of European imperialist expansion made a more statist and developmental approach imperative. The book, written by an acclaimed scholar of Republican China, offers a longue durée approach in order to trace ‘continuities between the late imperial and the Republican period’ (p. 203). Its four chapters proceed chronologically. Chapter One introduces the major ideas and tropes of classical and post-classical economic thought, particularly the minsheng mandate as the raison d’être of the Chinese state to nurture and pacify the people. The commercialisation of the Song dynasty (960–1279) also gave birth to a Confucian case for a free market unfettered by state intervention, epitomised in Sima Guang’s rallying cry to ‘store wealth among the people’ (Davis, The Chinese, ii, p. 359) which reverberated far into the late imperial period. Frugality, a moral virtue in Chinese as in many other cultures, also remained a necessary virtue until the silver-driven commercial revolution of the sixteenth century challenged the notion of scarcity as a necessary condition of humanity. Chapter Two outlines the new economic thinking as it emerged in the commercial hubs of Jiangnan during the late Ming dynasty, most famously by Lu Ji (1515–52), a sort of Chinese Mandeville (p. 92), who rehabilitated luxury from the accusation of moral decrepitude leading into poverty. The chapter also shows that pro-luxury arguments never became a majority position, though this did not mean that the Qing state was anti-market, only that it kept its distance. Interventionist policies attempted in the mid-eighteenth century soon fizzled out. The market was (largely) left to its own devices. By 1800, however, the laissez-faire of the prosperous eighteenth century gave way to anxiety about scarcity, population growth and a growing gap between the commercialised coastal cities and the rural hinterland. State retrenchment, Zanasi argues, is no contradiction to greater interventionism into the market, as writers of that time argued for restrictions on consumption facilitated by local elites in the name of the state. Frugality and regulated consumption remained a central trope even after China’s forced opening to foreign trade in the wake of the Opium Wars. It just found new justifications as a means to tackle the growing international trade deficit. After 1912, the commercialised Jiangnan region, now centred in Shanghai, for the first time gained a public voice and took on forms of post-industrial consumerism, as Chapter Four argues, only to produce more anxieties about the growing coastal–hinterland gap among empire builders who turned to socialist or national socialist ideas and promoted frugality as a bulwark against Western decadence. The book is a well-written tour de force through the growing Chinese, English and Japanese research literature on China’s economic history and the first generalising work on modern economic thought in English. It also makes important contributions towards the ‘thorny debate’ on the Great Divergence. In the eponymous book by Kenneth Pomeranz, Jiangnan serves as the comparative case for England before the Industrial Revolution. However, as Zanasi shows, Jiangnan’s commercialisation and prosperity was a special case, even for the critics of the frugality imperative, and an aberration and threat to China’s rural economy for its advocates (pp. 117, 170–71, 198–9). For the latter, China had literally to be protected from Jiangnan (and later from commercialised Shanghai, also located in the region). When the Jiaqing emperor turned away from pro-market policies, Zanasi defends this decision as not driven by ‘a comprehensive ideology or a vision of an all-encompassing economic system. These ideas instead inspired ad hoc solutions to solve specific problems’ (p. 201). The solutions, however, that many of the commentators cited in the book sought consisted in banning distilleries to save grain, banning silver to protect copper coin, banning opera performance to keep people focused on agriculture, or banning foreign and even inter-regional trade altogether. Some of these policies certainly echoed French physiocratic thought of the eighteenth century, except that the physiocrats did have a more comprehensive vision of the economy. And except that they were not the only game in town. Such subtle distinctions did not bode well for China’s ability to avoid the Great Divergence. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - Economic Thought in Modern China: Market and Consumption, c.1500–1937, by Margherita Zanasi
JF - The English Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ehr/ceac110
DA - 2022-04-26
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/economic-thought-in-modern-china-market-and-consumption-c-1500-1937-by-NPyK65wgVF
SP - 935
EP - 937
VL - 137
IS - 586
DP - DeepDyve
ER -