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CHINESE ECONOMIC HISTORY IN A NEW PERSPECTIVE: FOCUSING ON THE LATE IMPERIAL RURAL ECONOMY IN JIANGNAN
Author(s) -
Li Bozhong
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
pacific economic review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.34
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1468-0106
pISSN - 1361-374X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0106.2008.00406.x
Subject(s) - perspective (graphical) , chinese economy , rural economy , contrast (vision) , period (music) , economics , economy , history , history of china , rural area , development economics , geography , political science , china , philosophy , law , archaeology , aesthetics , artificial intelligence , computer science
. The Eurocentric growth model has been the basic workhorse for numerous Chinese economic historians. This deep seated Eurocentric paradigm is concerned mainly with conterfactuals and tends to ignore past reality. To illustrate the problems of this Eurocentric approach, this paper examines the rural economy of Jiangnan, also known as the Yangzi Delta, during late imperial times. A main characteristic of the villages in the Wuxi county in Jiangnan were the mixture of the rural–urban lifestyle and development. Jiangnan's developmental patterns, in the Song and the Qing dynasty, from the Maoist period (pre‐1979) to post‐1979 development, contrast sharply with the predictions of the Western development models.