READING: Mark Elvin: China's Ming-Qing Mercantile-Malthusian High-Level Equilibrium Trap
From "The Pattern of the Chinese Past'
Mark Elvin: The Pattern of the Chinese Past: The Mercantile-Malthusian High-Level Equilibrium Trap: ‘Reading in the literature of China two or three centuries before the modern age, there are moments when it is hard to believe that an industrial revolution had not begun. The phrases of Wang Shih-mao’s description of Ching-te-chen, the great porcelain-making centre in Kiangsi province, instantly summon up such a vision:
Tens of thousands of pestles shake the ground with their noise. The heavens are alight with the glare from the fires, so that one cannot sleep at night. The place has been called in jest "The Town of Year Round Thunder and Lightning’.!
So too does Yen Ju-yü’s account of the ironworkers of the Hupei/ Shensi Szechwan borders:
Their iron furnaces are seventeen or eighteen feet in height and fenced about on all sides with yuan trees. They are square in shape and solidly constructed of clay, with an opening at the top to allow the smoke to escape. Charcoal is put in at the bottom and ore in the middie. For every so many hundred catties of ore a certain number of catties of charcoal have to be used, a precise quantity which may not be increased or decreased. At the side more than ten persons will take it in turns to work the bellows.
The fire is not put out either by day or by night. The liquid metal and the slag flow out from separate ducts at the bottom of the furnace, the liquid metal turning into iron which is cast in slabs. Every furnace has an artisan who determines the timing of the fire and who can distinguish the appearance of iron in different stages of completeness. More than ten artisans are hired to serve each furnace. The largest numbers of men are needed for transporting timber and building the (charcoal] kilns in the Black Hills, and for opening up the seams and extracting ore from the Red Hills.
The distances which the ore and charcoal have to be taken vary, but over a hundred men are required for each furnace. Thus six or seven furnaces will give employment to not less than a thousand men. Once the iron has been cast into slabs it is sometimes manufactured locally into pots and farm tools. A thousand and several hundreds of men are also required for this work and for the transport [of the goods]. Thus the larger iron works in Szechwan and the other provinces regularly have two thousand to three thousand persons, and the smaller ones with but three or four furnaces well over a thousand.
In Kwangtung we read of water-driven hammers for pounding incense "without any expenditure of [human] muscular effort’. In Kiangsi, according to a provincial gazetteer, similar hammers were used for husking rice:
They are mostly found at present at important fords and places where merchants gather. Over a hundred of the machines may be installed in a line of buildings to supply the grain boats which come and go selling rice. Since prosperous farmers make use of much rice, it is particularly suitable that they should instal them.
In Fukien, paddle wheels were fixed to the sides of boats anchored in fast-flowing streams and used to turn hammers for the manufacture of paper, so that ‘the sound of pounding was like the whirr of wings’. Out of so widespread a mastery of the pre-modern mechanical arts it seems strange that no further technological progress should have come….
The problem is a difficult one. Throughout the Ming and the Ch’ing the Chinese showed resourcefulness in all the activities normally associated with invention. The adoption and diffusion of Western technology was in many respects considerable. New World crops were grown: maize, peanuts, sweet and white potatoes, and tobacco. The simpler kinds of Western cannon, handguns, clocks, telescopes and microscopes were successfully imitated, a fact which speaks for the high quality of the best Chinese craftsmanship. Small but significant improvements were made in a range of familiar indigenous techniques. Multi-colour woodblock printing was perfected; the smelting of zinc mastered. The ships sailing in northern waters learned to sail closer into the wind, which made them much safer.
There was a continual refinement of the adaptation of agriculture to local ecological peculiarities. The introduction in the north of underground cellars to create the moist atmosphere needed for cotton-spinning is an example of a parallel ecological adaptation of industry. The best Chinese techniques spread steadily over the country. Cotton, for instance, replaced hemp and ramie as the main clothing fibre. There was a greater use of wells (first encouraged by the Mongol dynasty) for providing water for fields in the north. And of course there were a handful of Chinese inventions: the merry-go-round windpump with its gybing sails, the bulletproof vest used by the troops of Li Tzu-ch’eng, soybean cake and other new fertilizers. Wang Cheng (1571–1644), working under the influence of the Jesuits, devised improved tools for use on his own farm and wrote a book about them. Clearly, the term ‘technological stagnation’ is misleadingly oversimple description of this period.
There were also organizational changes. Most of these we have already touched upon: the growth of money-shops and remittance banks, the guilds of merchants engaged in inter-regional trade, the decline in serf-like conditions of tenure for much of the peasantry, the growing density of the local market network. There were others, such as the attempt to use organizational means to combat insect pests. These developments further contributed to economic productivity.
Nor was entrepreneurship absent. Here is an account of how the price of fuel in Ching-yang county in Shensi was reduced:
County magistrate Lu Chen-fei submitted this memorial in 1629: I would observe that south of Ching-yang lies the Ching River, providing direct access to the Wei, on which there is a continuous flow of merchant shipping.
Ching-yang, however, relies on the damming of waterways and loads are not carried by boat, the people being unaware of the advantages conferred on them by nature. Leaving aside the question of whether grain might be transported or timber floated in the form of rafts, this is even true of coal. Ching-yang is densely populated and has nothing to burn as firewood. The people depend on carriers and carts to supply them with fuel for cooking; and the effort used up in transport is a source of distress. A picul of coal never costs less than 0.4 of an ounce of silver, and may rise above 0.5 or 0.7 of an ounce. It is not always a lack of food-grains which prevents people from lighting a fire in wet or snowy weather.
After having become aware of this, every time I went to the banks of the Ching River I would stand overlooking the current and gauge the depth. When I asked the boatmen about it they said: ‘The Ching River is quick-rushing, with numerous rocks, and is of varying depth. Merchant ships do not dare to travel on it.’ I sent my officials to inspect it, on foot along the riverside together with some boatmen. They reported that even in the shallowest places, if the water were only a foot or so deeper, it would take even a war-junk. I was delighted and declared it suitable for shipping. Even so, the people were apprehensive that accidental difficulties might arise. They grudged a small outlay, and so barred the way to subsequent profit.
I therefore had a long, narrow boat constructed, and told sailors to pilot it to Ming-chiao-k’ou in Lin-t’ung county and fetch coal from there. They made the round trip [of perhaps 50 miles] and had the coal unloaded in a mere three days. The transport cost was only seventy per cent of that needed for carriers and carts. I further ordered Ma Shou-ts’ang and other boat men from the foodboats at the various ferry-crossings to join with the above-mentioned boat and make several trips, giving them their wages in advance. Every picul of coal used to cost 0.4 of an ounce of silver, Now it is only 0.25 of an ounce. When the snow falls, the roads are muddy, and wheels and hooves unable to proceed, the benefit will be twice that in ordinary times.
Economic enterprise would thus seem to have been alive in late traditional China. There was certainly a keen awareness of comparative costs, and this could demonstrably have its effects upon the kind of technology used - as the cost of fuel changed the pattern of salt-making in Ch’üan-chou in Ming times:
Salt may be produced either by boiling or by evaporation. From before the Sung and Yuan dynasties both of these methods were used. Nowadays only the evaporation technique is employed. The boiling technique used the salt left by the two highest monthly tides. When the tide went out, the salt soaked into the ground; and if there was a strong sun it would form white crystals. These were gathered and used to form salt-mounds, which were further sprinkled with brine.
The ‘salt-mound’ was a hole in the ground under which there was a dripping pool, to which it was connected by a number of apertures fitted with reed tubes to draw off the brine. The water soaked through the salt-mound, ran down the tubes and dripped into the pool. The readiness of the brine for use was gauged by throwing in a hen’s egg or a peach-kernel to see if it would float. The brine was then drained into an earthenware container by the side of the stove; and a tube was used to draw it into a pan for boiling. The pan was made of bamboos plaited into the shape of a pan and smeared with a cement made from clamshells. Large pans could boil two hundred catties of salt in a day and a night; the small ones half of that.
The evaporation technique in like fashion involves gathering the saltiest parts of the ground and drying them in the sun until they are extremely dry. They are then put into a dripping-mound and [brine] is soaked through them into a dripping-pool. The water is taken from the pool and poured over the mound twice before it is fit for use. The evaporating pans are made of stone slabs very tightly fitted. It is the wind which reduces the water content, and so the salt is only a few feet thick.
One man can also get two hundred catties a day by this method. In the Sung a catty of salt cost ten cash, and when dear, twice this. These days the price is never more than two cash._ This is because the evaportion technique needs no expenditure for firewood._
It is therefore reasonable to assume that perfectly rational short-run considerations lay behind many or most choices of technique. This being so, we have to ask how the availability of resources, capital and labour may have affected the decisions of Chinese entrepreneurs in the late traditional period.
Clearly the shortage of many resources grew more severe. In many areas there was a lack of wood for building houses and ships, and indeed machinery. There was a shortage of fuels, most obviously in the coastal regions where the reed-swamps which had once provided plenty of combustible material were now being turned into paddy-fields. There was a shortage of clothing fibres (though this was mitigated by the introduction of cotton, which yielded much more fibre per acre than hemp or ramie). Land which could be used for growing cotton was often needed for growing food. There was a shortage of draught animals, and possibly therefore of animal manures, as northern grazing-lands were turned into fields. Metals were in short supply, particularly copper before the opening of the Yunnan mines in the eighteenth century, but also iron and silver. Above all, there was a shortage of good farmland: the quality of the new land brought under the plough in this period fell sharply. A major cause of these shortages was of course the continuing growth of the population under conditions of relative technological standstill.
One consequence of this lack of resources was that the cost of building even simple wooden machines might often be beyond the reach of many peasants. This is suggested by a passage in a gazetteer for Yung-p’ing prefecture (an area in present-day Hopei) describing a project for agri cultural improvement undertaken by the Mongol government in the late thirteenth century:
Where the land is so high that the water cannot be brought up to it, the officials should order the peasants to build water-pumps. To those who are too poor to be able to afford to do so they shall make a gift of the materials, and after the autumn harvest inspect those families using the water so that they may pay off the price in equitable fashion.
The high cost of metal may have been the reason why the Western cylinder and piston pump, known in China since the seventeenth century, was not used in spite of its potential value to farming areas dependent on wells for water. According to the Comprehensive Examination of Seasonal Practices, compiled in 1742:
In upland areas which I have seen where wells are used to irrigate the fields, the people either use the windlass and bucket or the well-sweep. Although these appear to be convenient, one may look up and down all day long without managing to water all of a mou of land. I have heard that in Shans and Honan the people work extremely hard to irrigate fields with water drawn from wells. In a year of drought, eight people toiling day and night can only manage several mou. In other areas it is the custom to be lazier.
Having seen the difficulties involved, people no longer enquire into the method of watering fields from wells. If the machine shown here is made, there is no need for a well-rope, bucket, windlass or well-sweep, and one man using it can do the work of several men. Used for irrigating fields, it can save about four-fifths of the labour needed.
Unfortunately the pump had to be made in copper - solid money in a Chinese peasant’s eyes - and was presumably too expensive, copper being in very short supply, for returns to justify investment. Merchant capital was of course available, and merchants did sometimes invest in the means of agricultural production. The irrigation system built outside Pao-t’ou early in the nineteenth century, in which ‘water shares’ were bought and sold independently of land, is an example. We can only guess that investing in a pump would not have paid as well as other possible investments.
Another example of knowledge not used is the Archimedean screw or “dragon’s tail pump”, to give it its Chinese name. The screw was brought to China by the Jesuits; and the Comprehensive Examination is emphatic that it was more efficient than the traditional square-pallet chain-pump. The screw consisted of a helical pathway formed by a partition wall that rose in a spiral in the space between a central axle and an outer cylindrical casing. The whole cylinder was inclined at an angle of about twenty-five degrees, with the lower end just under the water. When it was rotated, the water entered at the bottom and then rose up the pathway until it poured out the top. Considerable inventiveness was shown by the Chinese in devising ways of building up the partition wall with out using metal. One method, reminiscent of modern plastics technology, was to weave hemp or ramie fibres, or else splints, between vertical struts like a screen and then to waterproof them with a mixture of pitch/ wax t’ung oil lacquer and stone lime/ pottery dust, according to what was available. Another method, which fancy might compare to the modern use of hydrocarbons, was to build up superimposed layers of mulberry or hibiscus bark held together with pitch or wax.
Why this pumping device was little used is a mystery. Perhaps power transfer was a problem. When the screw was cranked by hand, it is unlikely to have surpassed the treadle-driven pallet pump, and the use of foot-power required wooden gear wheels, which was not the case with the simpler pallet pump. Practical experiment might yield interesting evidence on the balance of comparative advantage. Without this evidence, we can only conclude that there is no definite indication that the use of the screw would have significantly raised Chinese agricultural productivity.
One area where there was obvious room for improvement was land transport. The observations of an anonymous traveller who passed, disguised as a Chinese, through the south-eastern silk and tea districts in 1845, are to the point here:
The roads of central China are better than a stranger would expect to find them; considering that they are not made for the passage of two- wheeled carriages, and only for foot-passengers, with occasionally a wheel-barrow, and a few animals, the pathways are on the whole exceedingly good. In some places they were found fifteen feet wide paved with flagstones in the middle, and with well-laid pebbles on each side. For hundreds of miles, the traveller may be assured of meeting with good stone roads, at least three feet wide, formed of slabs of granite, mica, slate, sandstone or lime, according to the nature of the adjacent rocks, and the supply of stone in the neighbourhood. Over mountain passes, one or two thousand feet in height, roads are to be seen, cut into steps, six or eight feet wide, and laid with great care and exactness, for the convenience of passengers.
At the distance of a mile from each other sheds are to be seen, built over the road, and provided with seats, where the weary traveller may refresh himself by a little rest, and prepare for further exertions. These roads and sheds, together with the bridges and canals, are, as far as can be ascertained, all the product of voluntary and benevolent effort.
Another benevolent provision is the lighting of lamps along frequented roads, and near to dangerous bridges; these are made of thin layers of oyster-shells, fitted into a wooden framework, and either suspended from a lamp- post or fixed in a recess in a stone pillar; the light they afford is of course dim, but it serves to show where the bridge or road is.
Why, then, was vehicular traffic so little developed? One plausible explanation is that, given the scarcity of grazing-lands and fodder for animals, and human overpopulation, men were often the cheapest form of transport. There is also another possibility which deserves consideration: that it was inhibited by the efficiency of traditional water transport. The carriage provided by China’s extensive system of waterways was so much cheaper than by land routes that the level of development in areas without water transport was usually far below that of those areas which had water transport. The difference was so pronounced that we can regard it as a case of pre-modern economic dualism.
Illustrative evidence for this is provided by materials on Hunan province in the eighteenth century. In 1709 Chao Shen-ch’iao observed:
The three counties of Ch’ang-sha, Shan-hua and Hsiang-yin in Ch’ang-sha prefecture, the county of Heng-shan in Heng-chou prefecture, the two counties of Pa-ling and Li-chou in Yo-chou prefec- ture, and the two counties of Wu-ling and T’ao-yuan in Ch’ang-te prefecture are all on the banks of large rivers or have access to water routes. They likewise have places where rice is bought and sold [on a large scale].
But,
On account of shoals and the dangers of its waters, the prefecture of Yung-chou is entirely without [large-scale] merchants. That is to say it does have the petty commerce which commoners carry on between themselves. Everyone takes goods by cart to Heng-yang to sell.
Regulations issued in 1752 concerning the purchase of grain for the government made these observations on Ch’ang-sha prefecture:
The six counties of Ch’ang-sha, Shan-hua, Hsiang-yin, Hsiang-t’an, I-yang and Hsiang-hsiang are all close to the water’s edge. The government’s instructions should be followed, and purchases of rice for the [government] granaries should be made in the markets of the county capitals and in the market towns, and at the various riverine ports. Although the counties of Yu, Liu-yang and Ch’a-ling are on navigable water routes, these are either hill streams or else full of dangerous mudbanks, which makes transportation difficult. None of them have markets where [govermment] purchases can be made. It is necessary at harvest time to order the local officials to send silver to families who have a surplus of grain, and to buy it from them at current prices…. Furthermore, An-hua county is in a remote location among numerous hills. Boats cannot get to it…. Although Li-ling county contains the market town of Lu-k’ou, which is beside a large river, the latter is ninety li from the county capital. There is only this one navigable river, and it has shoals and treacherous places. It is very hard to haul the grain. Apart from the above-mentioned places, there are no riverine ports or places near rivers which produce grain.
The dualism, depending on the availability or absence of water transport, is clear, at least as regards the degree of commercialization,
To the extent that this is a fair picture of the facts - and obviously it is not adequate to meet the full range of regional diversity - certain consequences follow. Even substantial improvements in land transportation techniques, along the lines of those made in eighteenth- century Britain, would not have brought costs down to the level of water transport. Adam Smith recognized this clearly when he wrote in The Wealth of Nations: “Through the greater part of Europe the expense of land-carriage increases very much both the real and nominal price of most manufactures…. In China and Indostan the extent and variety of inland navigation save the greater part of this labour, and thereby reduce still lower both the real and the nominal price of the greater part of their manufactures.”
In China, even in the early decades of the present century, railways and steamships made possible only modest cost reductions as compared to the traditional junk, and sometimes only a gain in speed and reliability. It was therefore difficult, by improving traditional land transport techniques, to make goods produced in the backward areas competitive far away from home with comparable goods produced in advanced areas with access to water transport. The general economic incentive to search for improvements in land transport was therefore reduced, although it is possible to imagine exceptional cases in which they would have been attractive. Presumably, too, the water-based system with its lower costs, greater concentration of capital and customers, and its denser labour-force, to some extent attracted entrepreneurial interest away from the land transport areas.
There must have been ways in which the water transport system could have been improved on the basis of existing Chinese technical knowledge. But big advances by simple means, such as that accomplished by the Erie Canal in the United States in 1825, were no longer possible in China. They had, as it were, already been used up. Chinese water transport was faced with something of a technological discontinuity: probably only a large jump forward into the world of steampower would have meant a significant gain. This discontinuity made any new dynamic shift in the economy through reduced transport costs exceedingly difficult.
There was another technological discontinuity, that in agriculture. Yields per acre were very nearly as high as was possible without the use of advanced industrial-scientific inputs such as sclected seeds, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, machinery and pumps powered by the internal combustion engine or electricity, concrete and so on. Furthermore, there was not enough suitable land to raise the yields per worker for the Chinese farm labour force as a whole by using either eighteenth-century British techniques, which depended critically on the interdependence of crop-raising and animal husbandry, or nineteenth-century American techniques of extensive, low per-acre yield, mechanized cultivation. Traditional inputs, whether in the form of irrigation works, fertilizer or labour, were also nearly as high as they could be without running into sharply diminishing, or even negative, returns.
That the last is not merely theoretical fancy is shown by the numerous cases where new irrigation works seriously reduced the supply of water to existing systems or, in some instances, imperilled them by crowding low-lying lands, subject to periodic floods, with too many polders. Often, where there was in principle the possibility of improving per-acre yields, this was ruled out in practice by resource shortages. An example is the dry farming of Hope and Shantung. Investigations in the 1930s suggest that it could with profit have used more animal manure; but the supply of manure was inadequate because of the shortage of grazing land, which in turn reflected the need of a dense population to turn pasture into arable.
It is not easy to give substantive proof that (i) improvements in late traditional agricultural technology, (ii) increases in both investment and the provision of recurring inputs in farm production on the basis of this technology, and also (ji) the use of new resources (notably land) still available at this technological level, had all reached a point of sharply diminishing returns by the later eighteenth century. The diversity of the Chinese agricultural scene across both space and time makes aggregate measures of output poor indicators of the level of technology. The farm economy in Ming and Ch’ing times consisted of two widely different sectors: a high-yielding rice sector and a lower- yielding wheat and millet sector. The relative share of the latter rose significantly with the passing of time.
Likewise, as demographic pressure forced the Chinese to bring poorer and poorer land into cultivation, the relative share of marginal soils in both sectors increased. This may have been of considerable significance. Surveys in the 1920s showed that in the north the yields of wheat grown on irrigated land were over two- thirds again higher than those of wheat grown on non-irrigated land Under these conditions, a level of average per-acre output unchanged over time may conceal a marked increase in skill in working more favoured lands, or less favoured lands, or both.
If, therefore, we compare per-acre yields in 1400 with those in 185o we are not necessarily talking about otherwise comparable agricultural systems. Differences in crops, soil fertility, rainfall and temperatures make comparisons of per-acre yields between China and other countries even more potentially misleading as regards the level of the technology used.
After these cautionary remarks, we can consider a few statistics. The data presented in Professor D. H. Perkins’ quantitative survey of Chinese agriculture since 1368 suggest that productivity per mo rose steeply from under 140 catties of grain to about 224 catties in 1600. It then fell to a little above 200 catties in the 1770s, after which it rose again, modestly surpassing its previous best at a little over 240 catties by the middle of the nineteenth century. Much of the early rise must be attributed to recovery from the devastation of the Mongol period though we have no means at present of saying how much. The pattern, which suggests only a small overall rise in output per mou between 1600 and 1850, depends largely upon the high figure for 1600; and this could be lowered on the quite plausible assumption that more land was in fact being farmed at this time than Perkins allows for. The late Ming period was notorious for the concealment of arable, and later increases look suspiciously fast. Quite properly, Perkins tends not to use the 1600 data as a base for his conclusions. For the moment, we can simply say that if we accept them they lend support to our view that increasing the productivity of land was harder during the last few centuries of traditional China than it had been for some time previously.
Second, the per-acre yields of unmodernized Chinese agriculture in the 1920s, the first date when we have reasonably reliable figures, were substantially above those in most of Europe on the eve of the industrial revolution. Thus Chinese wheat yields at this time were in the region of fourteen bushels per acre, whereas in France, under somewhat comparable conditions of peasant smallholder agriculture, wheat yields at the end of the eighteenth century were only about 9.5 bushels, rising to around thirteen by 1850. Chinese rice yields in the 192os were about fifty-six bushels per acre.
Third, the attempt made by the Chinese Communists between 1956 and 1959 to increase agricultural output largely by the use of an intensified traditional technology and organizational changes does not seem to have raised either yield per acre or yield per farm worker. A policy of increasing industrial-scientific inputs, notably chemical fertilizers, was adopted shortly afterwards, and almost certainly for this reason.
Qualitative assessments by late traditional Chinese observers give further support to the view that agricultural output was near its pre-modern limits. Some time around 1740, Chu Lun-han wrote that: “To use the limited acreage of farmland to feed an ever-expanding population is a means which leaves us little further leeway.” The government became officially concerned over what it saw as a new problem: the continuing rise in grain prices even in years of good harvest. By the 1750s it was understood that this was due to population pressure. As Chu Yun-chin remarked a little later: “There are no further benefits to be had from the land, yet population grows more numerous This is why millet and rice cost more, and the prices of everything have gone up.”
The state encouraged the opening of new land by allowing the cultivator to become its legal owner once he had paid taxes on it. Land in the north-west and north was opened to migrants from China Proper, though their number was not large. Merchants were encouraged to import rice from abroad; and official degrees were offered to those who did outstandingly well. Maize and sweet potatoes, previously found mainly in Kwangtung and Fukien, were officially promoted. Pessimism was, however, the order of the day. Hung Liang-chi, whose gloomy views have earned him the title of the ‘Chinese Malthus’, believed that population growth was bound in the nature of things to outstrip production, that natural checks could not contain it, and that government remedial measures could never hope to be adequate. The only important dissenting voice seems to have been that of Pao Shih-ch’en early in the nineteenth century. “The land of the empire”, he wrote, “is the chief source of provision for the empire’s people. It there are more people there will be more producers. A large population is the basis of wealth. How could it on the contrary cause poverty? There is not much unused land in the empire, but productivity does not conform to any such restraints.” He saw the failure to raise productivity as the fault of the scholars: “They despise anything to do with farming, and do not research into it.”
The views of Western agronomists who observed late traditional Chinese farming at close quarters also suggest a system working near the limit of what was possible by pre-modern means. This is most evident in F. H. King’s Farmers of Forty Centuries (1927). J. L. Buck’s classic Land Utilization in China (1937) is not so unreservedly enthusiastic about the Chinese rural economy, but characterizes it as ‘one of efficient use of the land’ in international terms. More importantly, Buck shows the output per farm worker increasing steadily with the size of the farm, fewer workers per acre the larger the farm, and yields per acre approximately constant whatever the farm size. This suggests that the optimum ratio of population to farmland for pre-modern technology had long since been exceeded.
Furthermore, apart from organizational reforms, the few proposals he makes for raising per-acre yields without recourse at some point to modern technology are not without practical difficulties. For example, his advice that the straw, stalks and grasses often used for fuel (with the ash then serving as a fertilizer) be fed direct to animals for manure bypasses the problem of finding cheap alternative fuels.
The hypothesis that only inputs created by a fairly advanced stage of an industrial-scientific revolution (one that had not of course taken place in late traditional China) could have saved her agriculture from sharply diminishing returns to new methods, new investment, extra inputs and new use of resources, thus seems more plausible than the view that there was ample potential for progress within the terms of the old system. Accepting this, then, we are left with the question of why the population kept growing, and the pattern of its growth. For it was the expansion of the population which produced that combination of high-level farming and transportation technology with a low per capita income which perceptive economists since Adam Smith have recognized as the distinctive characteristic of China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries…
LINK: <https://archive.org/details/patternofchines00elvi/page/316/mode/1up?view=theater>
