Chapter 13 The second introduction to the great history of Chinese economy
Looking back on the 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, we must look at this process from the perspective of China's big historical view.Historian Huang Renyu once said, "China's revolution is like a long tunnel, which takes 101 years to pass through. Our life is too long to be 99 years old. The short and long are just our personal reactions to history, not the big ones. History. Only by pushing back the basic point of history by three or five hundred years can we absorb the outline of big history.”I also deeply feel that it takes a long time span to understand China's economic growth in the past 60 years.To evaluate the economic gains and losses in the 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China, it is necessary to trace back from 1949 AD to 1 AD when per capita GDP data is available, and at the same time look forward to the next 40 years.Put the Jiazi Year of the People's Republic of China into the economic history of 1948 and the economic future of 40 years, and trace the economic rise and fall of China from ancient times to the present, and then to the future, so as to find the historical economic positioning of the Jiazi of the Republic.In terms of economic methods, I use the main line of per capita income to run through the history from 1 AD to 2009 and the next 40 years, and use the "pearl" of each historical stage and future development stage to use the "line" of per capita income string up.At the same time, the perspectives of macroeconomics, especially finance, and human capital are the two sublines of this book.
Why has China's per capita income remained unchanged for a long time in history?Why has China always been a populous country in history?These are the two puzzles proposed by Professor Justin Yifu Lin in "Special Topics on Chinese Economy".I answer with a new model.From an economic point of view, China's "historical Three Gorges" does not exist.For the first time, I introduced human capital to explain China's traditional economic growth model, explaining that China has long been in a "high-level dynamic equilibrium" of "high technology level, low human capital, high population growth and stagnant per capita income".
As mentioned earlier, the productivity revolution is an uncertain black swan event, a new economic model completely derived from the existing economic leading industries, and belongs to the "imaginative economy".The Industrial Revolution broke out suddenly in Britain in 1820, bringing with it new business models unimaginable in an agricultural economy.Since Zheng He's last voyage to the West in 1433, China has been closed to the outside world, ignorant of the Industrial Revolution.In just 20 years from 1820 to 1840, the West grew rapidly due to the Industrial Revolution, while China was "boiled frogs". In 1840, China was defeated in the Opium War.A series of unequal treaties and its own lack of supply response have kept China in an unbalanced state of trade deficit for a long time, leading to a large outflow of Chinese silver and bringing about deflation. From 1860 to 1895, the "Westernization Movement" started with the military equipment industry, separated from domestic consumption, was limited by financial investment, and lacked the stamina of capital accumulation. As a result, China suffered a complete defeat in the Sino-Japanese War of 1895 and missed a rare opportunity for strategic development.
The war compensation caused by the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895 caused China to have a fiscal deficit and a capital account deficit. Unable to change the long-term trade deficit, China's economy experienced a serious imbalance in the balance of payments, which developed into a debt crisis.The debt crisis eventually led to the collapse of the late Qing economy.Following the collapse of the Qing government, the Yuan Shikai government, the Beiyang government, and even the Kuomintang government were unable to fundamentally abolish unequal treaties, solve China's long-term balance of payments imbalance, and have no way to invest in human capital on a large scale to bring China out of millennium-old agriculture. The economy's "high-level dynamic equilibrium" trap.From 1840 to 1948, China's per capita income basically did not increase, which was in stark contrast to the rapid development of the world economy.In a word, China's great history can be described as "a thousand years of glory, a century of sinking".The economic decline of the former big country has seriously hit China's economic self-confidence, and the entrepreneurial spirit represented by the Chinese dream has also dried up.
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