ABSTRACT
Until quite recently, debate over capitalism on the mainland was conventionally couched in a counter-factual manner: why, when the Song period (960-1279) seemed so pre-modern, for example, did the economy fail to develop along European lines?15 Whereas neo-Weberians continued with this line of argument, observing the many ways merchants remained under the thumbs of officials, late twentieth-century scholarship has gone on to discover thriving commercial quarters and a business subculture which, despite frequent lip-service to Confucian ideals (see, for example, R.J. Lufrano, 1997) seems to have been every bit as calculating as that found in the West (Gardella, 1992). Whilst experts on Adam Smith still argue over how he really viewed unfettered competition, Marx quickly came, early on, to the conclusion that the invisible hand was nothing more than ‘superstructure’: a philosophical justification for the class exploitation which modern ‘economic rationalists’ now see as saving the poor. Where European Marxists had generally viewed the capitalist stage of economic development as progressive, especially when compared to the traditional situation in Asia (causing some awkward moments for later Chinese thinkers; Brook, 1989), its unpleasant association with foreign imperialism left most writers to reject capitalism as reactionary.16 Although Mao admitted that international trade had permitted expansion of the ‘commodity economy’ he blamed foreigners for the destruction of the traditional handicraft industry and, ultimately, for restricting development of Chinese capitalism: a point of view widely accepted by Leftist writers in the West.17 As he argued in 1939, ‘National capitalism has developed to a certain extent and played a considerable part in China’s political and cultural life, but it has not become the principal socio-economic form in China: quite feeble in strength, it is mostly tied in varying degrees to both foreign imperialism and domestic feudalism.’18 When the second united front was in its infancy, Mao Zedong observed that ‘China’s feudal society ... carried within itself the embryo of capitalism’ and how ‘China would of herself have developed into a capitalist society, even if there had been no influence of foreign capitalism.’19 The resulting search for capitalist roots keep Chinese economic historians occupied into the 1990s.
