Introduction
How did people really live in late Imperial China? With one-third of the Eurasian population living in China at this time, an answer to this question is important for gaining an understanding of life in this region in the pre-industrial period.
It has been generally thought that the standard of living in China declined from relative prosperity to severe poverty by the end of the nineteenth century.’ In the last two decades, this traditional view has been challenged by a small but growing number of scholars who claim that the standard of living was rising, not falling, in late Imperial China.2 Since a long-term rise in the standard of living would be unthinkable in a society in which labour productivity declined among the overwhelming majority of producers, these scholars must demonstrate that labour productivity did rise during this period. In late Imperial China, agriculture continued to take up the bulk of the Chinese economy. The majority of the Chinese people still earned their living from farming, although commerce and industry were growing at the time. It is clear, therefore, that the standard of living could not increase if farm labour productivity declined. A study of farm labour productivity, therefore, is crucial to assessing the new view that the standard of living improved in late Imperial China.Thye central theme of this chapter is that labour productivity on farms did improve in Jiangnan between ’620 and ’850. The region of Jiangnan, located in east China and consisting of eight late Imperial Chinese prefectures in the Yangzi Delta,3 has been the most economically and culturally advanced area in China for centuries. The years ’620—1850 form the last period before China ‘opened’ to the industrial West in the mid-nineteenth century. In some sense, this region is the best ‘window’ through which we can clearly see economic changes in China before the arrival of the modern west. It is no wonder that the economic history of Jiangnan from ’620 to ’850 has attracted so much attention from scholars in China, Japan, and the United States.
The analysis in this chapter focuses on farm labour productivity in Jiangnan, and is based on two decades' research on the economic history of the region during the two centuries prior to ’850. The chapter begins with a critical analysis of the principal arguments presented by those who hold to the conventional viewpoint.
A discussion of the major changes in the peasant economy will follow, focusing on those changes that have been crucial to growth in farm labour productivity. I will then describe the process through which farm labour productivity changed in the region. In the last part of the chapter, I will deal briefly with the standard of living issue: did it really improve in Jiangnan during the period under study or not?
2.