The Great Divergence, by Peng Mulan, translated by Huang Zhongxian, Republic of Beijing Daily Press, April 2021.
"The Great Divergence" and its book: What is the "Great Divergence"
The Great Divergence responds to one of the most classic questions in the study of economic history: Why was Western Europe the first region in the world to transition to a modern economic growth model, while China, once similar to it, took a very different path after the 18th century? The first thing to clarify in answering this question is the development of China and Western Europe in the modern period.
What Peng Mulan presents in the first and second parts of the book is a picture that most scholars do not dare: until 1750, East Asia and Western Europe, or more specifically, China's most developed Jiangnan region had countless striking similarities with the most developed England in Western Europe—the two regions were very similar in terms of population, capital accumulation, technology, land and factor markets, family decision-making, and so on. When the perspective turns to luxury consumption and the "capitalist" system, Peng Mulan found that there are indeed differences between the East and the West, but these differences are not enough to produce a diversion between The East and the West. In particular, the pressures on the core regions of China (and Japan) and the core of Western Europe are almost identical in terms of the degree of ecological constraints.
Thus, the third part of The Great Divergence explains the main factors of the East-West divergence. Penmulan believes that the diversion of Europe from the Old World in the 19th century is largely due to the superior geographical location of the distribution of coal resources and the discovery of the New World. Both make it irrelevant whether Europe uses land intensively and have led to the growth of its resource-intensive industries. The global situation has made the Americas the main source of primary commodities needed by Europe, which has greatly alleviated Europe's ecological constraints. This luck has enabled Europe to turn to a resource-intensive, labor-efficient path. At the same time, Asia has fallen into a dead end of development, going further and further down the path of labor-intensive and resource-saving.
For Western scholars, this book, like many scholars of the California School (such as Wang Guobin's "Transforming China" and Li Zhongqing and Wang Feng's "Quarter of Mankind"), breaks the once prevailing "shock-response" model and Eurocentrism, allowing them to re-examine the development of Chinese history. The famous American economic historian Deirdre McCloskey commented on the book: "Penmulan used The European invention — economics — to overthrow Eurocentrism ... Europeans will never again think that they are the only ones in history who have stood at the gate of economic growth..."
For Chinese scholars, this is a seminal work. One of the great contributions of The Great Divergence is to point out the importance of reciprocal comparison. As Peng Mulan said, "... Odd-sounding questions such as 'Why didn't England become Gangnam' are undoubtedly no more accustomed than people's 'why Didn't Gangnam become England' are inherently smarter, but they are not inferior, and they have important advantages. "We should not take either Gangnam or England as our standard, nor should we ignore anything universal or specific in the development of the former industrial society between the two places.
In the field of Chinese economic history more than two decades ago, scholars debated the birth of the embryonic capitalism in the Ming and Qing dynasties, and why China "failed" in history – it failed to be the first to undergo the Industrial Revolution. This book has undoubtedly made scholars realize that modern economic growth can take many forms.
However, although the book "The Great Divergence" has made great contributions to the understanding of the problem of the Great Divergence in the academic community, it is not without regrets. Much of the evidence in this book comes from second-hand literature, not primary-hand material. Doing so would result in a selective bias in the listed evidence, i.e. the author could present only evidence favorable to his or her own views and ignore other adverse evidence involved in the literature.
The picture shows the Qing Dynasty's "Flowing Water Map of The Small Bridge", from which we can see the life scenes that make people yearn for in china's traditional economy and society.
From "The Great Divergence": When to "Great Divergence" and Why to "Great Divergence"
In the twenty years since the publication of The Great Divergence, the discussion of the Great Divergence has never stopped. The May 2002 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies published four critical articles on The Great Divergence, including a book review by Huang Zongzhi, Peng Mulan's response to Huang Zongzhi, Li Zhongqing, Kang Wenlin, and Wang Feng's response to Huang Zongzhi (Peng Mulan's evidence of the Chinese pattern in the book comes mainly from the research of Li, Kang, and Wang), and Robert Brenner and Christopher Isett. The most famous of these is the discussion of whether China's growth is development or an internal volume, first proposed by Huang Zongzhi.
Huang Zongzhi believes that Peng Mulan's depiction of Jiangnan in the book is too optimistic, and the portrayal of England is too pessimistic. He believes that the five revolutionary developments experienced by England in the 18th century and before, including the agricultural revolution, primitive industrialization, urban development, population transformation and consumption change, are interpreted as changes in the inner volume type (referring to the diminishing marginal return of unit labor), and the inner volume growth produced by the increasing contradiction between people and land in Jiangnan in the 18th century is interpreted as a development change, so that the development model of the two places around 1750 appears to be very similar. He also pointed out that the book focuses on measuring growth and development numerically, ignoring the real situation on the ground.
However, since Huang Zongzhi, there have been fewer studies focusing on the great diversion of agriculture. In their latest study, Ma Debin and Peng Kaixiang point out that agriculture should be the most important topic in the study of the great diversion, but it seems to have been ignored by scholars in the past two decades. Therefore, they have re-responded to the problem of the Great Divergence from the perspective of agricultural production, proposing to include seasonality in the consideration of China's growth patterns, especially the impact of seasonality on the interaction between China's agriculture and handicrafts. As Ester Boserup's theory shows, population growth increases the frequency of land cultivation and promotes innovation in labor-use technologies, giving agriculture an "intensification." At the same time, the obvious seasonal characteristics of China's economy in the pre-industrial era made the labor force shift from agriculture to handicrafts and other side industries during agricultural leisure, increasing the number of annual working days of the labor force and ultimately increasing the annual income. Their new research undoubtedly offers scholars a new perspective on involution, industrialization, and modernization.
In addition to the discussion of whether the development model of Jiangnan in the 18th century was inward-volume or developmental, the focus of academic research on the problem of large diversion also mainly focuses on two aspects, namely, the time when the large diversion occurred and the reasons for the occurrence of the large diversion.
The Great Divergence proposes that before 1750, east Asia (represented by China and Japan) and Western Europe had similar economic development paths, while the divergence between the two places occurred at the end of the 18th century. Peng Mulan later revised his view, arguing that the time of the diversion was about the middle of the 18th century. One of the main tasks of the book The Great Divergence is to revise what previously believes to be very early diversion times, such as what David Landes believes is 1000 AD and What Angus Maddison believes is the 14th century.
One of the more sensational articles in recent years is Stephen Broadberry, Guan Hanhui and Li Daokui, published in The Journal of Economic History, No. 4, 2018, on the accounting of Long-term GDP in China and Europe. They found that the Sino-Western divergence time was earlier than the California School believed, but also later than the time that early European scholars believed. According to their calculations, China's GDP was about 70% of Britain's GDP in 1700, 44% in 1750, and by 1850 this value had fallen to 20%. Even if only the developed regions of Jiangnan and Western Europe are compared, the gap between GDP began to widen around 1720.
Regarding the causes of the Great Divergence, in the past two decades, scholars have put forward their own views from various aspects such as system, culture, population, technology, industrial structure, trade, and national capacity. In general, more scholars are more concerned with the inevitability rather than the contingency of explaining the origins of modern economic growth. For example, Huang Zongzhi believes that the five revolutionary transformations described above were fundamental prerequisites for the industrial revolution that first occurred in England, while China (or Jiangnan) did not have any in the 18th century. Zhao Dingxin pointed out that Peng Mulan's analysis lacked a comparison of Chinese and Western institutional factors, arguing that the living standards in China's rich areas during the Ming and Qing dynasties were comparable to those in the more developed parts of Western Europe, when China's low rate of return on technological innovation and the strength of Confucian ideology could not make any fundamental breakthrough in China around the 19th century.
Robert Allen's The Secret of the Industrial Revolution in Modern Britain: A Deep Perspective on the World (Zhejiang University Press, 2012) highlights the importance of Britain's high wage model and low energy (coal) prices for the Industrial Revolution. Both were also closely related to the transformation of Urban Expansion, Trade Growth, Agricultural Progress, and Human Capital Improvement in Britain at that time. China's low wage model and high energy prices during the Ming and Qing dynasties made the development path different from that of britain. Joel Mokyr's latest research also continues his long-standing view that Western European culture differs from other cultures, especially From Chinese culture, in that it is skepticism, openness, and curiosity. These three qualities made it easier for Western European cultures to create and absorb "useful knowledge" and promoted the development of science and technology in Western Europe, thus embarking on the path of industrialization in Western Europe.
However, Peng Mulan, in his later response to the controversy of the Great Divergence, mentioned that he did not think that the factors that caused the diversion, such as institutional changes or technological creation improvements, were not important, but that the importance of coal and the New World had been underestimated by the academic community, and hoped that through his research, everyone could understand the contingency of history more deeply. The more the truth is argued, the more clearly these controversies have greatly promoted the academic community's understanding of the problem of the great divergence, in fact, this is also the way of research, just as Peng Mulan said in an interview (see Chen Huangrui's "Chinese History Research from the Perspective of Global History - Interview with Professor Peng Mulan", "Historical Theory Research", No. 1, 2017): "When facing some grand historical topics, it is impossible to put forward completely correct explanations on one's own." And in the constant debate, the real economic history will one day be restored.
Author | Hu Sijie
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