By the mid-eighteenth century, the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) was the dominant power within Asia. Its political system and institutions of state building were founded on structures inherited from previous Chinese dynasties as well as on the social and cultural codes of interaction among polities across Central Eurasia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. Foreign trade between China and other countries within and outside Asia was a calculated matter of political strategy and economic gain. In the decades leading up to the First Opium War of 1839 to 1842, China’s stance with respect to the Sino-Western trade became increasingly at odds with British ambitions in Asia. The growing tensions stemmed from abiding differences in the political economy of not just two nations, but two empires. The overseas influence of the British Empire took on a forceful new impetus with the British Industrial Revolution, and, over the nineteenth century, technological improvements in transport continued to power Western expansion in global trade.

The rural economy will predominate in almost any preindustrial society – perhaps particularly so in China. No barriers comparable to medieval Europe’s guild rules made large sectors into urban monopolies; and though China was probably the world’s most urbanized large society c. 1200, and perhaps still as urban as Europe in the late 1600s, much of its elite lived in the countryside rather than in cities or fortified castles (especially between roughly 1100 and 1550). Moreover, the property systems prevailing in China’s most commercialized areas created incentives for most nonelite families to remain in the countryside, transferring labor not needed for farming to handicrafts without moving to town. The result was a highly diversified rural economy and cities that, though often quite large, were much smaller than the rural surplus could have supported.

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.

The Silk Road trade, which involved mostly prestige goods, started from the Han dynasty, around the second century bce, under the protection of Han imperial expansion into Central Asia. The economy of the Han Empire was mainly based on agriculture. Taxes in the form of agricultural products – such as food grains, silk yarn and floss, and bast-weave cloths such as ramie and hemp – in addition to corvée labor provided the major revenue for the state. Although commerce flourished in cities and connected both rural and urban residents into a nationwide market, traders held the lowest status in the social hierarchy. The impetus for trade with foreign countries, therefore, was initiated by the Han ruling elite, who, like aristocrats in ancient regimes around the world, had always been looking for rare and expensive goods to mark their distinguished status. Meanwhile, the Han Empire engaged in warfare with pastoral nomads of the Central Asian steppe grasslands from the founding of the dynasty. The perennial wars with the Xiongnu nomad confederation extended the horizon of the Han rulers, north to the steppe and west to Central and South Asia, reaching as far as the Mediterranean.

Modern means of transportation and communication along water, rails, and roads had a profound impact on the economic and social development of China from the mid-nineteenth century onward. After the arrival of the steamship in the 1840s and the telegraph in the early 1860s, railroad construction began to emerge slowly at the close of the century, followed by bus and motor traffic bringing about macadamized city streets and highway expansion, with a modest level of air traffic taking off in the 1930s. This chapter addresses the structural changes in transportation and communication that characterized the transition from the last decades of the Qing empire (1644–1911) through the Republican period (1911–1949) to the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Metallic coinage, markets, and private merchants appeared in China during the Spring and Autumn era (771–453 bce), and they expanded rapidly during the Warring States era (453–221 bce). These periods were marked not only by rapid economic progress, but also by new conceptualizations of money, markets, and merchants. Both in times of political stability such as the Qin, Han, Sui, and Tang dynasties, and in times of political disunion such as the Warring States, the Three Kingdoms, the Jin, and the Northern and Southern Dynasties eras, money, markets, and merchants performed important economic and social roles. Which kinds of goods, then, served a monetary function from the Warring States to the Tang period? How did people use money, and how and where did they buy and sell commodities? What was the relationship between private merchants and governments? In this chapter, these issues will be examined using transmitted documentary records, archaeological materials, numismatic findings, and recently excavated texts.

For the Chinese, the nineteenth century was a period of waking up and realizing why the Middle Kingdom had fallen behind the West in economic growth. Not only had this large and once prosperous country fallen behind economically (with its apparent failure to industrialize), it also fell prey during the two Opium Wars to the same country that first embarked upon the Industrial Revolution – Britain. Consequently, a long period of autarky came to an end. While initially China was forced to open up only several “treaty ports” for trade and commerce, eventually the entire country was subjected to the influences of the West, and in spheres that went far beyond trade and commerce to also include industry, education, and even politics. By assembling data from a variety of previously untapped historical sources, this chapter attempts to analyze the Western influences that shaped the economic trajectories of late imperial China.

Support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the late 1940s owed much to its willingness to “stand up” against external interference in Chinese affairs, whether by Japan, the USA, or any other colonial power. This nationalist agenda may have been the decisive factor in its victory during the civil war, and it continues to be a key driver of popular support for CCP rule.

In the preface to his seminal Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953, Ping-ti Ho called his book “basically an essay in economic history” that “is not intended to be a demographic analysis, which must be undertaken by experts differently equipped than I.” Ho’s approach was endorsed by John K. Fairbank in his foreword to the book, because “statistics of the modern or would-be-modern type – census data and government statistical reports designed for the purpose – are unavailable for China in the Ming and Ch’ing periods.”1 For Ho and Fairbank, the research approach Ho took in his work belonged to population history, not historical demography. Whereas population history is a subfield of historical studies, using historical research methods to investigate population patterns in history, historical demography is a subfield of demography, mainly using research methods in modern demographic studies, in particular statistical analysis of data such as marriage, reproduction, death, and family structures, and investigates the relationship between fluctuations in these indicators and their social and environmental settings.

Intricate relations between people, animals, and plants were the basis of the entire imperial Chinese order no matter what dynasty was ostensibly in charge. Such relations were environmental in the sense that they formed interdependencies between species under diverse ecological conditions of climate and topography. The most significant environmental historical result of these relations for the eight centuries under study here was agriculture, the main source of China’s human-induced (or “anthropogenic”) ecological change. An extended, instructive example of the intricacies of farming’s requisite resource management comes from the Ming (1368–1644) town of Pingwang in the Yangzi delta, likely the most developed area of contemporary imperial agrarian practice.

The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of the state sector of the Chinese economy. The rise of the state sector manifested in the development and expansion of central state enterprises and regional state enterprises and resulted from the ideology and policy of the developmental state. This chapter traces the emergence and evolution of the ideology and policy of the developmental state, describes the development and expansion of central state enterprises and regional state enterprises, and addresses the issue of change and continuity across the 1949 divide.

China has the largest education system in the world today. It educates more than 260 million people and employed 15 million teachers in 2015. Besides its social impact, educational development has often been argued to be one of the primary reasons behind China’s stunning economic growth after the economic reform implemented in 1978. It is therefore of paramount importance to understand how education evolved in Chinese history.