ABSTRACT
The story of China’s effort to develop a modern industrial economy is one that students can follow in the news media today. The relatively slow pace of China’s economic development in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led observers in the past to portray China as an unchanging giant. Chinese culture itself came to be seen as an obstacle to economic change, and many commentators came to believe that only the “impact of the West” could propel China into the modern world. This essay is intended to dispel these myths. Instead we shall see that in the period between 1500 and 1800 China underwent important changes, which can be called a commercial revolution. However, a number of factors, both indigenous and external, limited the development of an industrial economy both before and after the mid-nineteenth century, when the Western presence became a major force in Chinese affairs. Our discussion of these factors will be divided into two parts:
A comparison of Chinese and Japanese development, to counter the myth of East Asian culture as an obstacle to development.
An examination of China’s commercial revolution and the role that the development of a complex commercial economy played in China’s industrialization process.
