Two Theoretical Resources for the Nineteenth Century China’s Incorporation Process : A Strategy for Understanding China’s Capitalist Transition

Abstract

In light of the encroachment of Western powers and a sharp decline of the self-sustained Qing Empire, prominent accounts of China’s historical capitalism have tended to mark 19th-century China as a decline. In contrast to the dominant view that sees 19th-century China as a dark age, world-systems scholars, implicitly or explicitly, conceive a basic premise that 19th-century China’s incorporation process can be understood as not China’s decline but China’s transition to capitalism. To that end, I identify some particularly salient problems of China’s incorporation studies in the past. To present a way for overcoming the theoretical problems of past incorporation studies, I explicate ideas of Immanuel Wallerstein’s and Giovanni Arrighi on China’s incorporation process and how their ideas cast a fresh light on the understanding of 19th-century China in transition from a precapitalist economy to a capitalist economy for dynamism. This paper would help to rethink the 19th-century Chinese history and to figure out how the 19th-century global connectivity between China and the capitalist world economy has paves the way for China’s new developmental path.