ABSTRACT
In their history of Chinese capitalism from 1550 to 1840, Xu Dixin and Wu Chengming (1985) took the labour-intensive nature of much Chinese industry as a sign of backwardness. They argued that the prevalence of rural industry with workers whose families also farmed indicated an absence of true capitalist industrialization, which would involve proletarianization, urbanization, and higher capital-labour ratios. In so arguing, Xu and Wu spoke both for a near consensus among historians in China at the time and for a view of the present in which China’s large urban factories, not its small-scale rural industries, held the key to its industrial future. Western modernization theorists shared these views, albeit for different reasons.
