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It is a wise choice for a backward country to explore overseas education bases to find the training for urgently needed talents. In 1900, the Qing government began actively sending students to study advanced technology in Japan. From that time, Tokyo Higher Technical School (THTS) became an indispensable overseas base for Chinese students studying abroad. Although the educational resources of THTS were not superior to those of the imperial universities, returning THTS graduates played a greater role in the industrial modernisation of China than the graduates from imperial universities. This article shows that the role of importers of technology is not only determined by the technology they have acquired, but also highly influenced by a variety of factors, such as opportunity and social demand, presenting a complex and changeable pattern in different contexts. For developing countries, the 'appropriateness' plays a more important role than the 'progressiveness' of the imported technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We employ a new, commodity-level dataset on the flow of goods between fifteen major treaty ports to estimate a general-equilibrium trade model for China in the late Qing era. The distribution of welfare effects depends critically on each port's productivity, China's economic geography as it influences trade costs, as well as the degree of regional diversity in production, which increases the potential gains from trade. We utilize this framework to quantify the size and distribution of welfare effects resulting from new technology and lower trade costs that emerged during the Treaty-Port Era. Our results suggest that the new trade with foreign countries led to significant changes in domestic trade relationships. There was a limit to how much could be gained through increased domestic trade, however, because differences in productivity across regions were relatively low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a survey and critique of recent endeavours to establish statistical foundations for a chronology for the great divergence based upon trends and levels in relative wages. Our reading of the bibliography in Chinese labour history, together with a preliminary investigation into other primary sources, suggests that the Kuznetsian paradigm for empirical economics may not be viable for the construction of analytical narratives for the Chinese and other premodern imperial economies in South and West Asia. Nevertheless, two datasets currently in print will continue to be quoted to lend support to numerically grounded speculations for levels and trends in real wages and welfare for the families of wage-dependent urban workers in China over the eighteenth century. Statistical evidence for the Ming and Qing dynasties calibrated for the purposes of comparing real wage levels for wage-dependent labour between China and western Europe can, however, be placed on a spectrum for accuracy and inferential analysis that runs from 'unfounded guess work' to 'plausible conjectures'. The unwelcome contention of this article is that the data published and potentially available for China (and probably for India and the Ottoman Empire) stand close to the unfounded guess work end of that spectrum. Meanwhile, and as a speculative conclusion, we offer a conjecture that the 'real wages' for Qing China's tiny proletariat, whose income included high proportions of wages in kind, have remained as elusive as they were when the real wage debate began a decade ago. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research note draws upon secondary sources to describe the role of western shipping companies in China during the late stages of the Qing dynasty, 1840–1911. Driven by industrialisation in Europe and North America and a rapid increase in global trade, the world shipping industry expanded greatly during this period. Keen to take advantage of this growth, the British, French, German, American and Japanese governments adopted policies designed to develop and support their national shipping industries, and to help them access the new markets in China. As a result, western shipping companies quickly came to dominate both coastal and international shipping in China. This pre-eminence is outlined in an overview, and then in more detail in three chronological sections, before possible lines of research-based enquiry are identified in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, China has become increasingly enmeshed in global institutions and global flows. This article places that phenomenon into historical perspective via a look back to important globalizing trends of a key earlier period: the late 1800s through early 1900s. The essay draws heavily on C. A. Bayly's discussion of that period, which emphasizes the way that moves toward uniformity do not necessarily produce homogeneity. Bayly's work is used both to illustrate the limitations of some competing ideas about contemporary globalization and how China is or is not being transformed by it, and to provide a basis for arguing that we are again seeing, now in China, important moves toward uniformity that are not erasing important differences between cultures and countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I discuss the references in Nature and Power to imperial China, especially its thorough discussion of key issues in China's environmental history, but I point out several limitations. Joachim Radkau says little about the role of local elites in agrarian policy, the impact of central Eurasian conquest on imperial regimes' attitudes toward the land, and the impact of global trade on the empire in the preindustrial age. The second part of the article discusses the important strategic and environmental role of trades in fur, tea, and fish from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides the first estimates of housing price movements for Beijing in late pre-modern China. We hand-collect from archival sources transaction prices and other house attribute information from the 498 surviving house sale contracts for Beijing during the first two centuries of the Qing Dynasty ( 1644-1840), a long period without major wars, political turmoil, or significant institutional change in the Chinese capital. We use hedonic methods to construct a real estate price index for Beijing for the period. The regression analysis explains a major proportion of the variance of housing prices. We find that house prices grew steadily for the first half-century of the Qing Dynasty and declined afterwards in both nominal and real terms through the late eighteenth century. Nominal prices grew starting in the late eighteenth century and declined from the early nineteenth century through 1840. But these price changes occurred with contemporaneous price changes in basic measures of the cost of living: there was little change in real tenns to the end of our period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the end of the fifteenth century, the Ming state redirected the entire flow of the Yellow River into the course of the Huai River in order the facilitate the transport of tribute grain. This shifted the major problems of water control from the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River to the Huaibei region. Huaibei was viewed as ‘a local interest’, as opposed to the ‘general interests’ represented by the central government, and was sacrificed for those general interests. These policies, which were continued under the Qing dynasty, created widespread and frequent flooding in the region, causing short-term famine and destruction and leading to long-term economic decline. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite the extensive literature on global slavery and servitude, human bondage in Xinjiang (Eastern Turkestan) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been largely neglected. Here bondage did not discriminate between ethnic, racial or religious groups and fulfilled a wide range of social, economic, and political functions, reflecting both the region's geographical position at the edge of Central Asia and its political position—first as a dependency and then as a province of Qing China. This paper discusses the nature of the forms of bondage that emerged in this unique geopolitical setting and suggests that the emancipation of Xinjiang's ‘British’ slaves at the end of the nineteenth century and the gradual decline of bondage resulted from a convergence of local, regional, and global forces. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social institutions were often founded by the elite to avoid social upheavals. Institutions helped mitigate the threat of violent social responses to labor-saving innovations. But their organizational forms were influenced by preexisting cultural and social factors. The differences in Chinese and English social institutions explain why England became the first modern economy. Using an English panel of poor relief and social unrest from 1650 to 1830, we document that poor relief was statistically significant in reducing social disorder. Social instability, in turn, negatively influenced innovations, while innovations were positively and significantly related to poor relief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tests recent ideas about the long-term economic development of China compared with Europe on the basis of a detailed comparison of structure and level of GDP in part of the Yangzi delta and the Netherlands in the 1820s. We find that Dutch GDP per capita was almost twice as high as in the Yangzi delta. Agricultural productivity there was at about the same level as in the Netherlands (and England), but large productivity gaps existed in industry and services. We attempt to explain this concluding that differences in factor costs are probably behind disparities in labor productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses land mortgage in Shicang Village, Songyan County, China during the middle and later Qing period of Chinese history. Details are provided about the history of economic activity in China and about the methods used by residents of Shicang Village to discharge mortgages. The effect of social status on land transactions is examined and the relationship between land prices, grain prices, and the mortgage rate is explored. Information is also presented about the decentralization of wealth through land transfer.

This article discusses a series of articles written by Jack Goldstone, Joseph M. Bryant and Rosaire Langlois debating the role of colonialism and imperialism in the comparative economic history of Eurasia. The author draws on his experience researching the economic and environmental history of China to provide a perspective on the industrial and agricultural divergence between countries in the Eastern and Western portions of Eurasia. The differences between the development of the scientific method in China and Europe are considered as well. The author considers several endogenous barriers to economic growth, including rural resistance to technology developed in urban China, maintaining that these divergences must be explained by sociologists comparing east and west.