Economics Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| History of China: Chinese history spans over 4,000 years, beginning with dynasties such as the Xia, followed by the Shang and Zhou. Central to this history is the emperor, who held the Mandate of Heaven. Periods of unity alternated with periods of fragmentation. Important dynasties were the Qin (first unification), Han, Tang, Song, Ming, and the last, the Qing. In the 20th century, a revolution led to the Republic and later to the People's Republic of China. See also Chinese Economy, China._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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Guido E. Tabellini on Chinese History - Dictionary of Arguments
Mokyr I 4 Chinese History/Chinese Economics/Mokyr/Tabellini: Although the growth of clans in China was a gradual, bottom-up process and hard to time exactly, it is generally agreed that clans spread as a major social organization among the commoners during and after the Song dynasty, at the turn of the first millennium AD, and they expanded further in the following centuries. Initially, clan activities centered on strengthening group consciousness through ancestral worship, but then they evolved to provide a variety of club goods and local public goods to their members, such as religious rites worshiping common ancestors, common schools and education, risk sharing through support for widows and orphans and, when necessary, protection against bandits or pirates. During the centuries after the Song, the clans’s activities evolved. They promoted the social status and welfare of their members, they organized markets, cooperated with state officials in acts of public administration, resolved commercial disputes, and acted as political lobbies. In the words of Ebrey (1986, pp. 55-56)(1): “Lineages organized around large estates appear to be the functional successors of communal families, like communal families they exerted considerable control over individuals, regulated their access to material benefits, and acted as a social and political unit in the larger society.” Even when they did not hold common properties, lineages were important and flexible organizations, that produced for a community what individuals could not provide for themselves. Clans, however, did more than provide local public goods and cooperation; they became a pillar of local public administration, playing a central role in poor relief and tax collection and supplementing state action at the local level (without however having self-governing autonomy over a territorial jurisdiction). Mokyr I 5 More recent scholarship has affirmed the centrality of the clan as the key unit of social organization in China.* >Chinese Economy, >Clans. [Contrary to the Chinese developement]: Europe: European corporate groups also diffused after the turn of the first millennium, to address the same basic social needs of Chinese lineage organizations: they provided mutual assistance and risk sharing, coordinated protection against external threats, performed religious functions, held collective rituals to strengthen collective identity, monitored the “good behavior” of their members, provided for burials, enforced contracts, intervened to resolve conflicts, helped to supply education and training, and facilitated financing of productive and trading enterprises. Many European corporate organizations emerged in the Middle Ages. One of the earliest were monasteries and convents, already common in Merovingian times. The Church itself can be seen as a “mega corporation” in many ways. Universities emerged later, but were to become an unusually striking and viable example of corporations. >Corporations, >Christian Church, >Europe. Mokyr I 10 Political unification: (…) China achieved unification early on while Europe remained politically fragmented for much longer. Europe: As recognized by many scholars, a key feature of European economic and political development is its polycentrism and political fragmentation. According to Mokyr (2016)(3), the argument goes back to David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and has been at the center of modern thought by economists and political scientists (Jones, 1981(4); Bernholz, Streit and Vaubel, 1998(5); Karayalçin, 2008(6)). Mokyr I 11 China: By contrast, China achieved unification early on, and this allowed a large concentration of state powers before countervailing forces could emerge. Mokyr I 12 Fragmentation/geographic factors : Unity vs fragmentation are endogenous outcomes, however. What factors account for these opposite deelopments in China and Europe? Some scholars point to geography, and in particular to the “fractured land” hypothesis popularized by Diamond (1997)(7) and quantitatively investigated by Fernández-Villaverde et al. (2023)(8). Europe terrain is rugged and broken by mountains and other natural barriers. China too has high mountain ranges, but its vast and productive plain between two navigable rivers arguably facilitated unification under a large empire. Thanks to its navigable rivers, China is also more interconnected than Europe, and this is reflected in China’s lower genetic variation and smaller linguistic heterogeneity (Scheidel 2019)(9). Ko et al. (2018)(10) and Scheidel (2019)(9) also point out that, throughout much of its history, China’s external threats were mostly unidirectional: they came from the nomads in the North. This feature, too, made it possible to avoid fragmentation because troops could be held close to the Northern frontier. Europe instead was exposed to external conflicts from several directions, and this facilitated the formation of strong military blocks in different geographic areas. >Geographic factors. Mokyr I 42 Cities: Throughout most of their history, Chinese cities remained governed by the centrally controlled administrations of the counties where they were situated. As noted by Weber (1958)(11), to avoid the risk of political fragmentation the imperial administration refrained from giving Chinese cities the status of exclusive territorial units (urban wards were the major administrative unit below the county), and cities did not have their own military. By the time of the Song dynasty, most local public goods in urban areas, such as fire stations, orphanages, hospices, hospitals and other public services were controlled and financed by the central administration, and the city administration was in the hands of state officials who were responsible for administering the region (Eberhard, 1956)(12). As state capacity declined in Ming and Qing years, nongovernmental associations informally took over many of these public services, and by the late nineteenth century many or most urban services were provided informally by guilds and native-place associations and financed from dues or from the property of these associations (Skinner 1977(13), pp. 548-51). * For instance, Shiue and Keller (2023)(2), using the violence of the Ming to Ching as a plausibly exogenous treatment effect, illustrate that clan effects in the acquisition of human capital were central to the response to the shock. They use multi-generational lineage data from 500 couples of Tongcheng, a county of China’s province of Anhui,Their, and show that kinship-based group effects are larger than village-based group effects. >Human Capital. 1. Ebrey, Patricia Buckley. 1986. "The Early Stages in the Development of Descent Group Organization" in Ebrey, Patricia Buckley and James L. Watson, eds., Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China 1000-1940. Taipei, Taiwan: SMC Publishing Inc., pp. 16-61. 2. Shiue, Carol and Wolfgang Keller. 2023. “Human Capital Strategies for Big Shocks: The Case of the Fall of the Ming.” Unpublished working paper. 3. Mokyr, Joel. 2016. A Culture of Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 4. Jones, Eric L. 1981. The European Miracle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 5. Bernholz, Peter, Manfred Streit, and Roland Vaubel, eds. 1998. Political Competition, Innovation, and Growth. Berlin: Springer. 6. Karayalçin, Cem. 2008. “Divided we Stand, United we Fall: the Hume-North- Jones Mechanism for the Rise of Europe.” International Economic Review, Vol. 49, No. 3, pp. 973–99. 7. Diamond, Jared. 1997. Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: Norton. 8. Fernández-Villaverde, Jesús, Mark Koyama, Youhong Lin and Tuan-Hwee Sng. 2020. “Fractured Land and Political Fragmentation.” Working Paper. 9. Scheidel, Walter. 2019. Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 10. Ko, Chiu Yu, Koyama, Mark and Sng, Tuan-Hwee. 2018. “Unified China and Divided Europe," International Economic Review, February, Vol.59, No. 1, pp. 285-327. 11. Weber, Max .1958. The City. Glencoe, IL: Free Press 12. Eberhard, Wolfram. 1956. “Data on the Structure of the Chinese City in the Pre-Industrial Period.” Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 4, pp. 253-68 13. Skinner, George W., and Hugh Baker D. R. 1977. The City in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press._____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
EconTabell I Guido Tabellini Torsten Persson The size and scope of government: Comparative politics with rational politicians 1999 Mokyr I Joel Mokyr Guido Tabellini Social Organizations and Political Institutions: Why China and Europe Diverged CESifo Working Paper No. 10405 Munich May 2023 |
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> Counter arguments against Tabellini
> Counter arguments in relation to Chinese History
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