The Chinese economy demonstrated significant vigor from the eleventh century to the nineteenth. This period of nine centuries achieved remarkable progress in implementing the imperial examination system, improving literacy, establishing private landownership, developing market institutions, adopting new crops and improved farming technology, strengthening the lineage order, and lifting ordinary people’s capacity to deal with risks. According to the optimistic view, this is also the period during which two economic revolutions, the Tang–Song and Ming–Qing transitions, took place, marked by continuous economic growth and improvement in living standards for the population.1 To other scholars, however, this long period of quantitative growth was largely achieved through population increase, preventing China from escaping the “Malthusian trap.” That is, while the total size of the Chinese economy may have grown due to the rising population, per capita living standards failed to rise above historical norms and might have even declined during the long period. This period’s achievement and impact were nothing comparable to that of the Industrial Revolution which started in eighteenth-century Britain.

For over two millennia, China has sustained the largest single human society on the planet through the development of one of the most sophisticated agrarian systems in history. Even until quite recent, agriculture occupied a central place in the Chinese economy, commanding a dominant 60 to 70 percent of the total economy throughout. Agricultural institutions define the Chinese economic system and agricultural production drove long-run economic change or growth in China. Agriculture was at the center of the Great Divergence debate. Agricultural harvest or failures sometimes spelled the rise and fall of dynasties throughout history. Moving to the modern era, Chinese agriculture became the scapegoat for China’s modernization failure and was regarded as the incubator for Communist revolution. However, given its overriding importance, research on modern Chinese agriculture has been surprisingly understudied for the last few decades.