Chapter 16 Section 3 High Level Agricultural Economic Equilibrium: 1～1839
China has long been a world leader in terms of agricultural productivity and living standards in history.In "Mencius Teng Wengong 1", it vividly describes the scene of China's agricultural expansion more than 3,000 years ago, "During the time of Yao, the world was still not peaceful; The five grains are not climbed; the beasts are forcing people, the way of the beasts' hooves and birds' trails is handed over to China. Yao alone worries about it, and he lifts up Shun to govern it. Shun made Yi control the fire, and the mountains and marshes were burned, and the animals fled. Yu Shu The Nine Rivers flow into the seas from Jiji and Luo, and flow into the seas; Ju and Han, drain Huai and Si, and flow into the rivers. Then China can get it and eat it. At that time, Yu was eight years away and passed it three times. Even if you want to cultivate, how can you get it? Houji taught the people how to harvest crops, arboriculture and five grains, and when the five grains are ripe, the people are educated."The ancestors of the Chinese nation used fire to drive away ferocious beasts, and controlled the flooding of rivers by dredging. "Then people can live on flat land", creating a plain area for people to live in, where they can have food to eat, and then Houji "taught the people to farm. , Arboriculture and five grains", imparting and promoting agricultural technology, increasing agricultural production, and improving people's living standards.
During the period from AD 1 to 1839, China experienced the Han Dynasty (AD 1-220), the Three Kingdoms and Two Jins, the Southern and Northern Dynasties (AD 220-589), the Sui Dynasty (AD 581-618), the Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) ), Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms (AD 907-960), Song Dynasty (AD 960-1279), Yuan Dynasty (1206-1368), Ming Dynasty (AD 1368-1644) and Qing Dynasty (1616-1839).The Han Dynasty and the Roman Empire were powerful states at the same time.Sima Qian recorded the basic situation of China in the early Western Han Dynasty in "Historical Records: Biography of Li Sheng and Lu Jia": "There are hundreds of millions of people in China, thousands of miles of land, the richest people in the world, many people and vehicles, everything is rich, and the government is governed by one family. It has existed since the beginning of the split between heaven and earth.” After the collapse of the Roman Empire, there was no chance of its revival.After the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty in 220, after 369 years of long-term division in the Three Kingdoms, Two Jins, and Southern and Northern Dynasties, China miraculously revived and established a unified Sui and Tang empires.Huang Renyu said, "The long-term division of the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties has only happened once in Chinese history."Therefore, the overall history of China's economy is continuous.
The prosperity of China's agricultural economy lasted until the Qing Dynasty.The famous painting "Surfing the River During the Qingming Festival" depicts the breathtaking prosperity of the market in Kaifeng, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty.Although the pace of growth is not stable, China has miraculously maintained long-term stability of per capita income through continuous agricultural technological progress, while its economic aggregate has ranked first in the world for a long time. It has become a great country in human history and created a brilliant civilization.Tocqueville commented in "On American Democracy" written in the early 19th century: "When the Europeans first arrived in China 300 years ago, they saw that almost all Chinese crafts had reached a certain stage of perfection, and for this reason amazed that no other country is more advanced than it."
Although China's feudal dynasties changed every 200 to 300 years, the economic model remained unchanged.Yin Maoke, an expert on Chinese economic issues, put forward the "high-level equilibrium trap" in his book "The Pattern of Chinese History" published in 1973, trying to explain China's thousand-year economic model, which had a wide-ranging and lasting impact.Yin Maoke believes that China's early scientific and technological development was much faster than that of Europe, but with the rapid population growth, the benefits brought by agricultural technological progress were completely swallowed by a new round of population growth, and the population growth Further induce improvements in agricultural technology, and so on.The development of China's agriculture, transportation and manufacturing technology in the past few centuries has reached the limit, and the huge population has caused a serious shortage of agricultural land, and the imbalance between people and land has made labor very cheap. "High Level Equilibrium Trap".This trap also reduced agricultural surplus, insufficient savings, and prevented the accumulation of primitive capital. As a result, even though China was close to the threshold of the modern industrial revolution in the 14th century, it was still unable to produce modern industry.
Although Yin Maoke's theory is convincing to a certain extent, I think it has four shortcomings: first, the inference on the decline of China's per capita income does not conform to historical facts.Adam Smith said in "The Wealth of Nations": "Although China may be in a static state, it does not seem to have regressed. There, there are no cities abandoned by residents, and there is no cultivated land left to be abandoned. The labor force hired every year is still Therefore, the funds designated to maintain labor have not significantly decreased.” The second is that the industrial revolution requires many conditions, especially the invention of the textile machine, and capital accumulation is not a sufficient condition.The third is that there is an essential difference between the agricultural economy and the industrial economy. The better the agricultural technology is improved, the more likely it is to turn a deaf ear to the industrial technology.The transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy is not only an issue of economic system transition, but also an issue of economic structure.When Yin Maoke analyzed China's economy, he focused on China's failure to independently create an industrial revolution, which caused the inference to go beyond the proper logical range and was far-fetched.The fourth is to ignore the endogenous nature of rapid population growth.Why does China's population always experience rapid growth?Yin Mao did not answer.I introduced human capital into Yin Maoke's model, and obtained a new model of China's agricultural economy for nearly 2,000 years.
Taking the economic growth model of Becker, Murphy and Tamoro as the main symbol, the birth rate enters the model as an endogenous variable, and the family decides the number of offspring and the amount of accumulated capital at the same time.Becker, Murphy and Tamoro came up with two possible equilibriums: one is the "poverty trap", that is, a high birth rate is accompanied by a low economic growth rate, which is often said to be the phenomenon of "the poorer you get, the poorer you get"; The second is "high income equilibrium", that is, low birth rate accompanied by high economic growth rate.When human capital investment income becomes more and more attractive, parents will pay more and more attention to the quality of children and reduce the number of children. The low birth rate is accompanied by high economic growth rate.How can we get out of the "poverty trap" and reach the state of "high income equilibrium"?Becker, Murphy, and Tamoro did not provide good policy advice on the "primary driving force" of human capital. They only believed that it required historical luck that huge investment in human capital could trigger the economy from a "poverty trap" to a "high economy". Income equalization" transition.The accompanying feature of the British Industrial Revolution was a demographic transition, that is, a continuous decline in fertility and a continuous increase in per capita income.The popularization of education brought about by the European Renaissance and the establishment of the university system represented by Oxford and Cambridge may be the "first driving force" of British human capital.
From AD 1 to 1839, China's economic model was basically the same, entering a "high-level dynamic equilibrium" of "high technological level, low human capital, high population growth and stagnant per capita income".Due to the low level of human capital and the high birth rate, the benefits brought by the improvement of agricultural technology are completely consumed by the new round of population growth, and the increase in population brings about the reduction of per capita land, which in turn promotes the continuous improvement of agricultural technology. Improvement, and so on.China has maintained a huge population at a relatively high level of agriculture and produced a huge economic aggregate, but per capita income has remained basically unchanged.Use a medical example to illustrate: Overweight can easily lead to high blood pressure because the heart's blood supply capacity cannot keep up with weight gain.
I compare China's economic aggregate to the weight of the human body, and blood pressure to per capita income. A rise in blood pressure means a decrease in per capita income.This human body gained weight rapidly, but the blood pressure did not rise, and the human body remained healthy as before, because the heart of this human body became stronger and stronger.The heart is China's ability to continuously improve technology.If China does not have the "heart" of continuous improvement of technology, there will be "high blood pressure" and it will be impossible to gain weight.It is this "heart" that keeps the Chinese economy from falling into the Malthusian trap of "low-level dynamic equilibrium".For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, New China developed "two bombs and one satellite" when the per capita income was less than 300 US dollars, showing the tradition of a technological power.Below, I list 4 facts to give a concise and internally consistent explanation of China's economy in the past 2,000 years, hoping to help clear up the seemingly contradictory historical fog.
In addition to the population decline during wars and large-scale famines, China's population has generally grown for a long time. In the absence of an industrial revolution, it has jumped out of the low-level "Malthus trap". This cannot but be said to be an economic miracle.As shown in Figure 2-1, the populations of China and India grew over a long period of time from 1 AD to 1839. In particular, the population of China began to greatly exceed that of India in 1700.In 221 BC, Qin Shihuang unified China, and the Western Han Dynasty was established in 206 BC. After the "Government of Wen and Jing", China's population approached the 50 million mark.In AD 1, Emperor Hanping ascended the throne, and the population of the Han Dynasty continued to skyrocket, with a total population of 59.6 million. This huge population figure itself was unprecedented in human history, nearly double the total population of Europe at that time; the population of the Song Dynasty The population exceeded 100 million; in 1644, the Qing Dynasty was established, with a population of about 140 million. The "Kang-Qian Prosperity" lasted for 150 years of stability and prosperity. The duration is rare in the history of the world. "History of the Qing Dynasty" stated that "the scene of Yongxi made future generations want to linger, but it cannot be done today." The "prosperous age of Kangxi and Qianlong" is mainly manifested in the growth of population. Kangxi's "prosperous age breeds people and never adds taxes" and Yongzheng's tax policies such as "split Ding into Mu" stimulated population growth. In 1741, the national population broke through. There were 142 million people, approaching 400 million in 1820, and their lives were basically relatively stable. This is a miracle in an economy without industrialization.
In "On Population" published in 1798, Malthus talked about the population problem in China, and believed that the law of population, that is, the "Malthus Trap", also worked in China.China's population growth exceeds the growth of means of subsistence, there must be a corresponding mechanism to restrain the population.Malthus wrote:
If we can be sure, China is the country with the most fertile land in the world, almost all the land has been cultivated, and most areas are harvested twice a year, people live very frugally.We may then infer with considerable confidence that the population of China must be very large, without taking the trouble to examine the customs and habits and encouragement of early marriages of the lower classes of China.Such an examination, however, will be of great help to us in ascertaining how the restraining factors restrain the further increase of population, that is, what crimes, poverty and misfortunes prevent population from exceeding the support of the land.
Adam Smith believed that China's population was stagnant, but Malthus speculated that the widespread prevalence of "early marriage" in China resulted in a high birth rate.Malthus believed that China's agricultural productivity had stagnated, so how could there still be a high birth rate?He was confused.Therefore, he infers that famine and abandoned babies are likely to occur in large numbers in China, and the population is affected by positive inhibition.He wrote:
However, what is recorded in most books on China is not consistent with this argument.According to records, early marriage is prevalent in all classes in China.Dr. Adam Smith believed that China's population was at a standstill.These two situations seem to be contradictory.Every piece of land in China has been cultivated for a long time, and the average annual yield of the land is unlikely to increase significantly. Therefore, it is indeed impossible for China's population to increase rapidly.The prevalence of early marriages may not be exact, but if the prevalence of early marriages is a fact, then as far as we know the matter at present, it seems that the only explanation is that the prevalence of early marriages inevitably leads to overpopulation, but the occasional famine and abandoned babies This phenomenon has suppressed the overpopulation growth caused by early marriage.The phenomenon of abandoned babies in famine years may be more serious than Europeans imagined.
In ancient China, the "famine and abandoned babies phenomenon" guessed by Malthus appeared frequently, but relying on a large number of widespread "famine and abandoned babies phenomenon" to curb the growth of China's population deviates from historical facts.Roz Murphy pointed out in "History of Asia", "In general, until about the middle of the 19th century, the material life of most Chinese people in terms of food, clothing and housing seems to have been better than most people in other parts of the world."A member of the Amherst mission wrote in his diary in 1816: "Peace and tranquility everywhere, and we see looks of contentment and good humor... It is surprising how few beggars are so few in a country so populous." The negative suppression expected by Malthus did not appear systematically in China, indicating that Malthus greatly underestimated China's progress in agricultural technology.For example, Malthus's description of "two harvests per year in most areas" is not very accurate. In fact, farmers in southern China have mastered the technology of three-season rice rotation.
Another important reason is that China's human capital is relatively low.The birth rate is directly related to the level of human capital in China.China has traditionally attached great importance to investing in human capital.In Chinese cultural tradition, "learning" is a very important treasure.Confucius said that "there is no discrimination in teaching", and he emphasized the fairness of education, but "three thousand disciples and seventy-two sages", the proportion of Confucius' disciples and the "sages" in the total population at that time was too small.The first of the Four Books is "Great Learning". There is a saying "people do not learn, they do not know righteousness". Unfortunately, education in ancient China has not been popularized to the public, and there are only a few families who can afford their children to study in the "ten-year cold window". To "teach without discrimination", so in the 18th century China's human capital was lower than that of Britain.At the end of the Han Dynasty, the total number of students in government-run colleges reached 30,000, accounting for less than 1‰ of the total population.Murphy believes in "History of Asia" that "China's educated elite group, and similar elites in other Asian societies, probably never exceeded 2% of the population."
In the fifty years before 1820 in Britain, the male literacy rate had reached 60%.Moreover, the quality of China's human capital has been greatly reduced by the imperial examination system, which has led to a lack of scientific knowledge in the Chinese society with a long-standing tradition of "scholarly excellence leads to officialdom". Because China's imperial examination system is not a mass education, the content is single, and it ignores natural science .In his article "The Needham Mystery: Why the Industrial Revolution Didn't Originate in China", Justin Yifu Lin believed that the reason why China did not successfully break out the scientific revolution probably lies in the imperial examination system, which made intellectuals unwilling to invest in the human capital necessary for modern scientific research. Especially things like doing controlled experiments or mathematically investigating hypotheses about nature.Before the Sino-Japanese Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, the development of modern education in China was quite slow and the foundation was extremely weak.Due to low human capital and low per capita income, the cost of raising children for Chinese parents is low, and the return on investing in children's human capital is also low.Coupled with the traditional concept of "There are three kinds of unfilial piety, and having no offspring is the greatest", we choose "more children, more blessings".Therefore, China's birth rate has always been high.
Britain accumulated a large amount of human capital before the Industrial Revolution. 2009 is the 800th anniversary of the founding of Cambridge University, and Oxford University was founded hundreds of years earlier than Cambridge University.The establishment of the university system represented by Oxford and Cambridge is very helpful to the accumulation of human capital in the UK.The European Renaissance and the rise of science also accelerated the popularization of education.As early as the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon argued forcefully that it was the acquisition of greater knowledge, not changes in temperament or inner abilities, that explained how people thought differently from what they used to think.Bacon was the first to study learning itself as a serious scientific problem.During the Renaissance, the power of science was gradually revealed. In 1605, Bacon completed the two-volume "On the Progress of Learning" in English. This is a work with learning as its research object. part of the plan.
Bacon believes: "The way of human beings to gain power and the way to acquire knowledge are closely related, and there is almost no difference between the two; but because people have developed a harmful habit of thinking abstractly, the safer way is Starting from the beginning, explain how each science develops from various bases related to practice, and how it plays an active role like a stamp, leaving a mark on the corresponding speculation and determining this speculation.” Bacon also believes that learning It is a good medicine. One of his famous sayings is "Reading history makes people wise, reading poetry makes people smart, mathematics makes people thoughtful, science makes people profound, ethics makes people solemn, logic and rhetoric makes people eloquent; whoever has learned , all become character".Bacon's advocacy of the learning atmosphere and methods encouraged Britain to attach importance to science, and played a positive role in making the Industrial Revolution break out first in Britain instead of France or other countries in the world.During the rise of the United States, Bacon's ideas were widely spread on the North American continent.The pace of educational progress in the United States is astonishing. Between 1870 and 1950, the average education level of Americans increased by 0.8 years per decade. In 1960, the average number of years of education for people over the age of 15 in the United States was 8.49 years, making it the world's leading education power.
As shown in Table 2-1, China's population expanded rapidly in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the area of cultivated land per capita decreased significantly.The pressure of population on land is one of the important reasons for promoting technological change in China, and it also has a profound impact on people's way of life.I found that in the United States, the proportion of McDonald's stores that mainly serve beef burgers is twice that of KFC stores that mainly focus on fried chicken, but in China, the opposite is true, and the proportion of KFC stores is twice that of McDonald's stores.At first, I thought that KFC entered China earlier or that its marketing was more localized than that of McDonald's. Later, I found that there was not much difference between these two aspects.When I was studying the relationship between population and land in China, I suddenly woke up and found the real reason.China's population has grown for a long time, land has become scarce, and labor-intensive production techniques must be adopted.Raising cattle and sheep requires a lot of land and is uneconomical, while pigs and chickens can be intensively fed and rely on waste food as feed.Therefore, for a long time, Chinese people have mainly relied on pork and chicken for their protein intake.
China's agricultural technology has been continuously and steadily improved for a long time, such as the four great inventions that we are still proud of today: the compass, gunpowder, papermaking and printing.It can be said that China is born a technological power."In Bengal in the East Indies, and in some of the eastern provinces of China, too, Adam Smith admits, improvements in agriculture and manufactures appear to be of ancient origin."In this regard, Joseph Needham's "History of Science and Technology in China" published in 1954 made the world systematically aware of China's once brilliant technology.
Needham can be described as a compound talent today.After he obtained a Ph.D. in Science from Cambridge University, he switched to research on the development of Chinese science and technology, and thus won great honors. In 1959, he was elected dean of Gonviue and Caius Couege, Cambridge University; in 1971, he was elected as a fellow of the British Academy of Humanities; in 1992, the Queen of England awarded him the highest honor.When I was in Cambridge, I visited the Needham Research Institute he founded, and heard an anecdote about Needham: Cambridge University stipulates that students cannot cross the lawn, only academicians of the college can.Even so, Fellows of the Academy rarely take advantage of their privilege.But Needham was different. He always took shortcuts from the lawn, and always kept his head down.Perhaps, he is too obsessed with China's science and technology, and has no time to care about the demeanor of academicians.
When Needham inspected the evolution of science and technology in China, he not only mentioned China's "Four Great Inventions", but also inspected various technologies such as iron and steel smelting and water navigation.He believes that in the past thousand years, China's science and technology "in fact did not regress at all", but "has been advancing steadily", "In terms of the impact of technology, at the time of the Renaissance and before the Renaissance, China occupied the . . . the world has been far more blessed by the tenacious artisans of ancient China and the Middle Ages than by the artisans and eloquent theologians of Alexander's day". In 1973, Yin Maoke also believed that due to the pressure of population, China devoted all its efforts to the development of agricultural technology, so that by the time of the European Industrial Revolution, China’s agricultural technology was far ahead of Europe, including multiple cropping, irrigation, close planting, improvement of farming tools, etc. Wait.
Table 2-2 shows that the grain yield per unit area in China increased steadily, indicating that agricultural productivity continued to increase from 1400 to 1820, especially from 1750 to 1820, the grain yield per unit area in China increased from 1544 kg/ha to 1840 kg/ha.According to the research of Professor Perkins of Harvard University, in the 600 years from the beginning of the Ming Dynasty to the end of the 1960s in China, the average growth rate of population and total grain output was almost exactly the same.Therefore, the conclusion that Malthus drew in "On Population" that "every piece of land in China has been cultivated for a long time, and the average annual output of the land is unlikely to have a large increase" is wrong.
China has made great technological achievements. In 1990, American economist Joel Mokyer wrote in his book "Leverages of Wealth - Technological Innovation and Economic Progress", "In terms of technology, China's failure to maintain its technological supremacy is the most incredible thing. Yes. In the hundreds of years before 1400, the Chinese developed technologically at an astonishing pace, and as far as these events can be measured, at a rate comparable or even faster than that of Europe".He summarized 10 technological achievements in China: (1) major improvements in rice cultivation revolutionized Chinese agriculture; (2) iron plows replaced ancient Chinese bronze plows in the 10th century BC; During the Yuan Dynasty, seed drills, weeding rakes and long-tooth rakes were introduced; (4) In the use of blast furnaces, the Chinese were more than 1,500 years ahead of Europeans; (5) In the textile industry, Chinese and European hand spinning wheels appeared roughly at the same time ( 13th century); (6) In the adoption of water power, China was roughly on par with Europe; (7) As early as the 10th and 11th centuries, China made exquisite water clocks; (8) In terms of ship design and construction, the Chinese Several hundred years ahead of Europeans; (9) Chinese invented paper, which was 1,000 years earlier than Europeans; (10) Between 700 and 1400 AD, China appeared porcelain, paint, medicine (acupuncture), etc. to demonstrate technological achievements example of.Mokyr pointed out with emotion: "It can be said that the Chinese are only a short distance away from ruling the world, but then they are getting further and further away."
China's economy has achieved the world's most brilliant performance in the era of the agricultural revolution, but at the same time it has reached the "glass roof" where the agricultural economy can create per capita wealth. In 2007, Madison published the book "The Long-term Performance of China's Economy (960-2030 AD)", which calculated China's long-term GDP and per capita GDP indicators according to the real purchasing power (PPP) method. China's GDP accounted for the world's GDP The proportion of the total, China's per capita GDP is equivalent to the percentage of the world average.Figure 2-2 clearly shows that from 1 AD to 1000 AD, China’s per capita living standard reached a high level where the agricultural economy could create wealth very early, and remained basically stable. From 1000 AD to 1500 AD, China Per capita income has increased to a certain extent, but from 1500 AD to 1839 AD, per capita income stayed at the "limit board" for nearly 400 years. This period happened to be the early stage of the European Renaissance and the British Industrial Revolution.Maddison points to the fact that China had been stagnant since the 11th century.Maddison also pointed out that from the 13th century to the 18th century, the existing evidence on agriculture and urban population shows that China's per capita income did not increase significantly.
Regarding the long-term stagnation of China's per capita income in a highly developed agricultural economy, Adam Smith said in "The Wealth of Nations", "China has always been the richest country in the world, that is to say, the land is the most fertile and the cultivation is the most meticulous. , the country with the most people and the most industrious. However, for a long time, it seems to have stagnated in a static state. Today's traveler's report on China's cultivation, industriousness and population density, and Marco Po Compared with Luo's account, there is almost no difference. Perhaps long before the time of Marco Polo, China's wealth had fully reached the level of development allowed by the country's legal system...China seems to have been in a static state for a long time, and its wealth may have The limits allowed by the legal system of this country were long ago fully reached, but if other laws were adopted, the limits allowed by the soil, climate and location of the country may be much greater than the above limits.In "On Population", Malthus also expressed a similar consensus, "China's wealth has been stagnant for a long time."It should be said that Adam Smith's insight is relatively accurate.
Figure 2-3 shows!The economies of China and India were almost evenly matched between AD 1 and 1820.After 1400 A.D., China's total economic output significantly surpassed that of India, and it remained the world's largest for nearly 400 years.The fundamental reason for China's leading economic output is that China is a country with a large agricultural technology. Through the progress of agricultural technology, the whole society can maintain a population size that was unimaginable in the era of agricultural economy.
The above four facts show that the Chinese economy has not experienced the "Matthew Effect", that is, getting poorer and getting poorer, and it has not fallen into the "Malthus Trap". Instead, a rare "high-level dynamic equilibrium" has emerged, that is, a On the one hand, the lower the level of human capital, the more children will be born, and the poorer they will be; on the other hand, the poorer they will be, the more they will try their best to improve agricultural technology, and the more they improve, the richer they will be.As a result, the poverty effect brought about by the high fertility rate and the wealth effect brought about by continuous improvement of technology offset each other. China's per capita income has stagnated for a long time, but population growth has brought about the expansion of economic aggregate. Therefore, China's economic aggregate has long been at the forefront of the world.Due to the limitation of the economic added value that the agricultural economy can create, the Chinese economy has experienced "growth without per capita income growth" in the course of 2,000 years.At the same time, the productivity revolution must come from outside the agricultural technology, and the "high-level dynamic equilibrium" in the agricultural economy has become an undetectable economic trap and hindered the transition of China's economy to an industrial economy.
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