Modern Chinese Social History in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

This chapter describes the Chinese economic growth. It specifically explores the trends and developments in demography, technology, social, political and economic institutions, and international economic relations at the two ends of the Eurasian land mass. It also explores the economic and demographic responses to population changes that underlay the most important features of premodern economic growth. Both premodern and modern economic growth in Europe and China were shaped by their differences in social and political institutions, and the international environment. The economic effects of Western imperialism have generally been grossly exaggerated, by both the critics and the defenders of the capitalist West. In the last decades of the twentieth century China is importing Western technology and making its own growing contributions to its economic development.