ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is the main factors in China’s socio-economic domain: namely the predominance of agriculture in the economy, prevailing private individual land ownership, the landholding peasantry as the majority, the physiocratic state, the centralised government and Confucian ideology. Although they had innate links with each other which are sometimes crucial for understanding of premodern China at this stage, these factors are mainly dealt with in isolation. This method of analysis occasionally leads to some inevitable repetition. But the advantage is that it is possible to see the individual pattern and impact of the evolution of each factor over time.
