Talk:Industrial Revolution in China

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is part of WikiProject China, a project to improve all China-related articles. If you would like to help improve this and other China-related articles, please join the project. All interested editors are welcome.
Stub This article has been rated as stub-Class on the quality scale. (add comments)
More information about this article...

Also if someone wants to look at Peter Perdue's newest book China Marches West, the last chapter has an excellent summary of the major theories of Chinese historography.

Roadrunner 17:59, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] To know more chinese economic history first

Before start working on this subject.. I would recommend all editor particpate in this subect to read Andre Gundre Frank's Reorient .. it would partially explaint the economic status of chinese at 19th century..

And there are lots of professional historian work on chinese economic history ... especially regarding this subject.. I'm too busy on working my own master degree thesis to do work here.. but I can give some clue.. chinese economic system is FAR complicate than some high school kid or normal foregin who are not chinese to think there is only self-sustained system.. professionalize farmer.. etc already existed during Song dynasty. And the monetary system of chinese also tells a high level of economic activities.. If I've time I might contribute something to this article...... 218.162.76.157 14:32, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

Whel, there is a fact that the per capita energy use in early modern china is estimated te be about about 20% of europe's.--RafaelG 02:25, 4 April 2007 (UTC)


reOrient is actually excellent and this article shows some of the Eurocentric attitudes critiqued therein. First of all, I have deleted the section on China's per capita income, because the citation does not show what is claimed in this article. Secondly, while many certainly do claim that China had a low GDP per capita, this point has not been proven, and just as many think that there was rough parity. It is clear that labor was cheap in China than in Europe, but this may have more to do with inequality and land density. In other words, it seems that China was a productive but very unequal society.

Furthermore, I added a couple citations from reOrient to represent the favorable view toward China. It is true that China's "backwardness" is no longer taken for granted as the mainstream view (eg, see Wikipedia's "list of regions by past GDP"), so perhaps this view really should be front and center. Nonetheless, I'll let it slide for now. Agh.niyya 04:13, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

the society within china itself varies from area to area, it is afterall, about the size of europe. like in europe, area with sea access does alot better economically, geography play a part and it is difficult to compare development directly. as for the discussion that it was more stable, i actually find it a weakness as people are less likely to change if everything is going great; i find competition between rival european kingdom to be a major factor in leading revolution. because there is a great number of government there, it have a higher chance of finding the right formula and best model will be copied by lesser administration. in a documentary created by china, it rate England highly in the development of industry, because of 1 simple administrative feature lacking in china: the patent. china was definitely more productive at that time, but without legal protection, there is not much reasoning in mass production as people can steal your methods from the factory. Akinkhoo (talk) 06:40, 13 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Changed mainstream view -> traditional view

What was marked as the "mainstream view" is not the mainstream view among current economic historians of China. A lot has changed since 1970.

Roadrunner (talk) 17:48, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Production

When Gurdner refers to "production", what exactly does that include agriculutural production?