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The Partially Opened Door: Limitations on Economic Change in China in the 1860s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Shannon R. Brown
Shannon R. Brown
Affiliation:
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
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Extract

The economic impact of the West on China has long been a subject of debate among students of Chinese history. Despite numerous books and articles, however, a consensus has yet to emerge. Part of the reason for this, I believe, is that the more analytical contributions to the debate have been too sweeping in their historical coverage, while those with a more limited time perspective have been insufficiently rigorous in their analysis. The aim of this paper is to renew this debate, but to do so by a method that will, hopefully, avoid the pitfalls of the past. Specifically, I intend to employ an explicitly theoretical framework to examine the facts of a particular period—the 1860s. This decade is especially important since it immediately followed the expanded opening of China by the Treaty of Tientsin in 1860. The analytical framework employed—economic theory—is applicable to any period in modern Chinese history, but as the data examined are drawn mostly from the 1860s, my conclusions, strictly speaking, are applicable only to that decade. For reasons discussed below, however, I strongly believe these conclusions to be applicable to the entire period from 1860 to 1895.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 12 , Issue 2 , April 1978 , pp. 177 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

1 An important, early contribution is Chi-ming, Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, 1840–1937 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965).Google Scholar More recent is Robert Dernberger's analytically tight, but historically general, survey ‘The Role of the Foreigner in China's Economic Development, 1840–1949’, in Dwight, Perkins (ed.), China's Modern Economy in Historical Perspective (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 19–48.Google ScholarThe most recent contribution is Rhoads Murphey's magnificent study, The Outsiders (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1977).Google Scholar

2 Britten, Dean, China and Great Britain: The Diplomacy of Commercial Relations, 1860–1864 (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

3 Nathan, Pelcovits, Old China Hands and the Foreign Office (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1948), p. 19.a 1864 b 1858 c 1874Google Scholar Sources: Hsiao, Liang-lin, China's Foreign Trade Statistics (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), p. 268;Google ScholarSun, Yu-t'ang, Chung-kuo Chin-tai Kung-yeh Shih Tzu-liao: Ti-i-chi (Materials on the History of Modern Industry in China, First Collection) (Peking, 1957), pp. 234–7;Google ScholarPaul, Cohen, China and Christianity (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 69–70.Google Scholar

4 Ibid., Ch. 3.

5 An impediment to economic change is, like friction, something which reduces the effect of a given stimulus. It is not an absolute obstacle—it might, for instance, be overridden by a larger stimulus or eliminated by institutional change.For an enlightening discussion of this problem see Albert, Hirschman ‘Obstacles to Development: A Classification and a Quasi-Vanishing Act’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 13, No. 4, Pt 1 (July 1965), pp. 385–93.Google Scholar

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8 For the most recent discussion of this colorful event see David, Pong, ‘Confucian Patriotism and the Destruction of the Woosung Railway, 1877’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4 (October 1973), pp. 647–76.Google Scholar

9 For a thorough discussion of the attitude of the Chinese government towards Western efforts to build railroads and telegraphs in China see Saundra, Sturdevant, ‘A Question of Sovereignty: Railways and Telegraphs in China, 1861–1878’, Diss. Univ. of Chicago, 1975.Google Scholar

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11 Feuerwerker has estimated China's gross national product in the 1880s to be about 3,339 billion taels. Assuming it to have been twenty percent smaller in the 1860s results in an estimate of 2,671 billion taels. Since exports from 1864 to 1869 averaged about 64 million taels annually, the ratio of exports to GNP was about 2.4 percent. Imports averaged about 53 million taels annually during the same period, giving an import ratio of about 2.0 percent. In Japan in 1878–87, the earliest period for which data are available, the export ratio was 5.4 percent and the import ratio was 4.9 percent. By the end of the century it had risen to 12.8 percent and 14.6 percent respectively. Even if Chinese GNP in the mid-nineties was no larger than Feuerwerker estimated it to be in the eighties, the export and import ratios in China on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War would still have been less than 4.0 percent each. Albert, Feuerwerker, The Chinese Economy, ca. 1870–1911 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1969), p. 2;Google ScholarHsiao, China's Foreign Trade Statistics, p. 268;Google ScholarKuznets, ‘Quantitative Aspects’, p. 119.Google Scholar

12 On tea see Robert, P. Gardella, ‘Reform and the Tea Industry and Trade in Late Ch'ing China: The Fukien Case’, in Paul, Cohen and John, Schrecker (eds), Reform in Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 71–9.Google Scholar

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14 Feuerwerker, ‘Handicraft’, pp. 347–8.Google Scholar

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17 This is well discussed in Thomas, G. Rawski, ‘Chinese Dominance of Treaty Port Commerce and its Implications, 1860–1875’, Explorations in Economic History, Vol. 7, No. 4 (Summer 1970), pp. 451–73.Google Scholar

18 For a chronology of their actions see Kim, K. H., Japanese Perspectives on China's Early Modernization (Ann Arbor, Center for Chinese Studies, 1974), pp. 4–12.Google Scholar Also see Albert, FeuerwerkerChina's Early Industrialization (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1958), esp. Ch. 1.Google Scholar

19 Paul Cohen has an interesting discussion of the different intellectual and political traditions of these two worlds, which he refers to as littoral and hinterland, in Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T'ao and Reform in Late Ch'ing China (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1974), pp. 239–76.Google Scholar

20 Curtis, P. Nettles ‘British Mercantilism and the Economic Development of the Thirteen Colonies’, Journal of Economic History, XII:2 (Spring 1952), 105.Google Scholar

21 In the early 1890s the land tax and grain tribute brought in 36 percent of Peking's revenues, the Maritime Customs 25 percent, the salt gabelle (including the likin on salt) 15 percent, native customs and likin 18 percent, miscellaneous 6 percent. George Jamison, Report on the Revenue and Expenditure of the Chinese Empire,Google Scholar cited in Feuerwerker, The Chinese Economy, p. 66.Google Scholar

22 The difficulties incurred in using transit passes were endless. See, for example, Alcock to Stanley, 31 December 1867, in Great Britain, Foreign Office, FO 17/478. The lack of use of transit passes is indicated in many ways. For instance, in Shanghai in 1868 only one percent of the customs revenues came from transit passes. Since the transit pass rate was half that of the regular customs duty (i.e., about 2½ percent) this indicates that only two percent of the goods passing through Shanghai were covered by transit passes. Winchester to Alcock, 3 April 1867, FO 228/432. Also the opposition of British merchants to Alcock's efforts to make transit passes mandatory suggests that either they were paying internal taxes at a rate below 2½ percent or that they believed transit passes didn't work. See Mary, C. Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism (1956; 2nd printing, Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 287–93.Google Scholar

23 Treaty of Tientsin: Rules of Trade, Rule 3.

24 Alcock to Stanley, 23 August 1866, FO 17/450, and 5 September 1866, FO 17/451.

25 Treaty of Tientsin: Rules of Trade, Rule 5.

26 Dean, China and Great Britain, Ch.4.Google Scholar

27 Discussed in Walters to Alcock, 11 July 1866, FO 22/420.

28 Consequently, nearly all of the 40 ‘industrial’ establishments begun by foreigners in the treaty ports from 1843 to 1870 provided services either for the foreign trade sector or the treaty port community. See Sun, Yü-t'ang, Chung-kuo Chin-tai Kung-yeh Shih Tzu-liao: Ti-i-Chi (Materials on the History of Modern Industry in China, First Collection) (Peking, 1957), pp. 234–47.Google Scholar

29 For a fuller analysis see Shannon, Brown R., ‘The Ewo Filature. A Study in the Transfer of Technology to China in the Nineteenth Century’,unpublished MS, 1977.Google Scholar

30 Brown, ‘The Ewo Filature’, p. 21.Google Scholar

31 Medhurst to Wade, 22 June 1873,Google Scholar in British Sessional Papers, HC, LXVI (1873), p. 145.Google Scholar

32 Dean, China and Great Britain, Ch. 5.Google Scholar

33 Pong, ‘Confucian Patriotism’, pp. 658–9.Google Scholar

34 The classic statement of the role of the innovating entrepreneur is by Joseph Schumpeter. See, for example, The Theory of Economic Development (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1934), Ch. 2, esp. pp. 66–7.Google Scholar