Award-Winning History Professor, Kenneth Pomeranz, Launches the CRC Annual Event Series

On October 15th, 2008, Professor Pomeranz presented a lecture on “Chinese Development and World History: Putting the ‘East Asian Model’ in Perspective” at the High Museum. Approximately 120 people filled the Hill Auditorium. Professor Pomeranz’s presentation presented the following ideas:

Levels of economic performance in core regions of Europe and East Asia were surprisingly similar until almost 1800, but the institutions governing these economies were different in critical ways. Among other things, the Chinese systems of landed property rights, family formation, migration, and state policy interlocked to create a political economy that was relatively productive and stable, but required both an open frontier and certain political and environmental conditions to keep growing. All of these conditions ceased to hold in the 19th century, with disastrous consequences. Meanwhile Europe’s departure form what had been a shared set of constraints was shaped in part by exceptional resource bonanzas.

But despite the enormous setbacks and turmoil of the 19th and 20th century, certain basic elements of the high Qing political economy remained intact, and ultimately proved quite compatible with new waves of growth, at least for coastal China; those patterns resemble some aspects of a distinctive pattern of industrialization previously seen in Japan and Taiwan. Central features of this path include a very important role for rural industry, for light industry, an emphasis on labor-intensive, often resource-saving kinds of production, and a large role for external trade.

In the Chinese case, however, the “East Asian” features of development along the coast must be seen in the context of relations between the coast and the Chinese interior; a generally poorer set of regions where development looks very different, and which – both in Qing times and more recently—has posed ecological and social problems that the state has seen as a threat to stability. Today, the government’s “develop the West” program – set against a backdrop both of looming resource shortages in East China industries, unusually large regional differences in living standards, and unprecedented rates of migration (now directed towards the coast) and urbanization may represent both the outcome and the end of social, economic, and environmental patterns that have characterized China’s political economy for centuries.