The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 12: Republican China, 1912-1949, Part 1
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THE RETURN OF BUREAUCRACY,
I 9 2
7-3
7
823
Only the National Resources Commission, under the direct authority
of Chiang Kai-shek and the Military Affairs Commission, followed a
policy of confiscation which resulted in putting under government con-
trol most heavy industry and mine workings.
The public sector of the economy, in a strict sense, remained limited.
But it is not possible to view industrial and commercial enterprises which
did not belong to the public sector as purely part of the private sector.
The role played by the regime's senior officials with a diversity of holdings
gave these businesses an ambiguous status, characteristic of bureaucratic
capitalism. Though generally denounced by historians, the corruption
and confusion between the interests of the state and those of its servants
are not, however, enough to define the system. And the similarities with
the official-supervision and merchant-management enterprises (kuan-tu
shang-pari)
of the nineteenth century are only partially useful. The bureau-
crats of 1930 did not, in fact, resemble at all the mandarins of
1880.
Despite
the view that seeks similarities between Wu Ting-ch'ang and the man-
darin provincial governors, the initiative behind development came
essentially from the centre and it was limited (if not to four 'great fam-
ilies'
- Soong, K'ung, Chiang, Ch'en - as is still contended in communist
historiography) at least to a small number of very high ranking officials.
The most active of them had studied abroad and their initiation into the
modern world, and to its industrial and financial methods, was incom-
parably superior to those of their predecessors in the Ch'ing era. By
taking in banking and economic experts this bureaucracy (which included
at least the upper echelons of the central administration) had accelerated
its proper development. The dwindling of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie
accompanied this modernization of the bureaucracy. For reasons of
political strategy communist historians have set up a close correlation
between these two phenomena, making the first the direct consequence
of the second and calling on the bourgeoisie to line up against the Kuo-
mintang regime.
It is not certain, for all that, that this double evolution did not obey
far more general imperatives: those imposed by the economic and tech-
nological take-off of an immense rural country. In its Golden Age the
bourgeoisie had provided proof that this take-off was impossible in the
absence of a state apparatus capable of maintaining (or restoring) unity
and national independence. Insofar as the Chinese historical tradition
excludes the coexistence of a strong (or relatively strong) state and au-
tonomous groups in the bosom of a pluralist society, symbiosis with the
bureaucracy could have appeared as the bourgeoisie's only possible form
of survival.
Being much closer in these respects to the 'new class' of today's
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
824
THE
CHINESE BOURGEOISIE
socialist regimes than
to
the Western liberal bourgeoisie, this bourgeoisie
-
bureaucracy amalgam must then
be
judged neither
on its
relations with
private enterprise
nor on the
corruption
of its
morals (which
is
common
in various ways
to all the 'new
classes')
but
rather
on its
capacity
to
secure
the economic development
of the
country.
Was
it
responsible
for the
stagnation denounced
by
Douglas
S.
Paauw
or Lloyd
E.
Eastman
?
26
'
Or on the
contrary should
it be
credited with
the expansion described
by
Ramon Myers
268
or
Thomas
G.
Rawski?*
69
The uncertainty surrounding
the
economic balance sheet
of
the Nanking
decade does
not
make
the
diagnosis
any
easier. This uncertainty, never-
theless, applies mainly
to
the
evolution
of
the
rural world
and
these
authors agree
in
recognizing
the
progress
of
the small modern sector.
The
index
of
industrial production, drawn
up by
J. K.
Chang, indicates that
with
the
rate rising annually
at
8-9 per
cent
the
Nanking decade
saw
a
rhythm
of
development comparable
to
that which prevailed during most
of
the
republican
era
(1912-37).
T.
Rawski insists
on the
other hand
on
the qualitative progress made
in
that period
by
the
developmental
in-
dustries.
Nevertheless, beneath this general tendency
to
expand,
a
cycle emerges
parallel enough
to
that
of
the 1920s. After
the
post-war economic miracle,
interrupted
by
the
crisis
of
1923-4 which
was
prolonged
by
three years
of revolution
and
civil
war, the
modern sector,
at
the end
of
1928, ex-
perienced
a
new
period
of
prosperity until
the
following crisis
in
1932.
In
1935
a
quarter
of
Chinese factories
had
ceased working. Work
had
barely resumed when,
in
1937,
the
Sino-Japanese
war
broke
out.
In
the
1930s, just
as in the
preceding decade, these economic fluctua-
tions were essentially determined
by
outside events. Coinciding with
the
world crisis,
the
substantial depreciation
of
silver, which between
1928
and
1931
lost more than half
its
value
on
the
international market,
in
effect meant devaluation
for
China.
The
resultant stimulating effect
on
exports compensated
the
effects
of
the
Western crisis
and by
acting
as
a
brake
on
certain imports acted
as a
substitute
for
customs tariffs that were
incapable
of
protecting
the
national industries.
When
the
devaluation
of
the
pound sterling,
in
1931,
and of
the
American dollar,
in
1934,
caused
a
strong revaluation
of
silver,
the
fall
in prices
had
immediate repercussions
for
Chinese producers,
but
in
the
267 Douglas
S.
Paauw, 'The Kuomintang and economic stagnation 1928-1937',
JAS,
16.
2
(Feb.
1957) 213-20; Eastman, The
abortive
revolution,
ch.
5.
268
Ramon
H.
Myers,
The
Chinese peasant
economy:
agricultural
development
in
Hopei and
Shantung
1890-1949.
269
Thomas
G.
Rawski, China's
republican
economy:
an
introduction.
(Joint Centre
on
Modern
East Asia, University
of
Toronto-York University, Discussion paper no.
1.
1978).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
THE RETURN OF BUREAUCRACY, I927-37 825
treaty ports the importers sought to maintain the prices of the preceding
period. The buying power of silver did not increase as quickly in China
as on the foreign markets and this disparity provoked a massive outflow
of metal and a violent inflation. These surges of inflation and deflation,
combined with the effects of the Japanese aggression in Manchuria and
Shanghai, contributed more than all other factors to shake the economy
of the treaty ports during the 1930s.
Compared with this permanent phenomenon of dependence vis-a-vis
the world market, the return in force of the bureaucracy and the decline
of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie assumed only secondary importance.
It was not bureaucratization that hampered the take-off of the modern
sector and eventually that of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie: it was the
weakness of China, as a nation. In the absence of any political and social
revolution, the symbiosis between the bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy,
which gave the Kuomintang regime its urban flavour, would not have
been able to open up the way to a real modernization of the economy.
The failure of the Chinese bourgeoisie (whether as a bourgeoisie of the
classic type, 'liberal and Western', in the 1920s or as the bureaucratized
bourgeoisie of the following decade) inhered in a much more general
cause of failure: that of economic
take-off.
If we abandon the illusions of the liberals who wished to see it as the
source of a third force, and abandon too the exaggerated dogma of the
Marxists who have identified it as a necessary stage of the revolution, is
it necessary then to consider this experience of the Chinese bourgeoisie
as merely a sneeze in history - an episode without posterity? In later
phases of the revolution the bourgeoisie was to be eliminated as a class.
Yet a heritage survived: urban, modernist, democratic and cosmopolitan.
This tradition - of a national development opening onto the rest of the
world - inspired the modernizing bureaucracy of later times. The Chinese
bourgeoisie was the first - as a class - to take on the challenge of modern-
ization; that is why the tradition which it founded continued to inspire
those who dreamt of succeeding where it had failed.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS
I. INTRODUCTION: THE REPUBLICAN PERIOD IN GENERAL
Historical research and writing on China 1912-49 have flourished in four major
parts
of
the world
-
China, Japan,
the
Atlantic community and
the
Soviet
Union
-
but communication among them has been less than perfect. No doubt
this is due to the fact that most historians have but one lifetime at their disposal.
They should try to take account of work on China published in Chinese, Japa-
nese,
English, French, German, Russian, Korean and other languages, just
as
they should also
be
interested
in
concepts derived from economics, political
science, sociology, psychology, anthropology and other disciplines.
It is an
imperfect world.
The Chinese recording
of
events after the end
of
the dynasty
in
1912 was
aided by the rise
of
the press and publishing industry. Historical compilation
and publication were pursued after 1949
on
Taiwan under
the
Nationalist
government of the Kuomintang, and in the People's Republic both before and
after the Cultural Revolution. The 1980s are witnessing an enormous outpour-
ing of Chinese documentation, research and discussion on republican history.
Meanwhile Japan's expansion
on the
continent and then
the
victory and
revolution of the CCP stimulated a growing flood of China studies in Japanese
while
the
Soviet involvement
in
China's revolution squeezed forth
a
more
meagre flow of work
in
Russian. War and revolution also led British, French,
German, Dutch and American Sinology
to
cohabit with
the
social sciences
under the tent
of
'area study'.
A
considerable outflow
of
historical scholarship
has resulted.
But few Chinese scholars feel at home in the Japanese language and are able
to work
in
Japanese collections
of
Chinese materials. Westerners who
use
Chinese easily are not always
as
facile
in
Japanese
or in
Russian, and
so on
around the circle.
In
dealing with Republican China we are far from the state
of multi-archival scholarly competence achieved
by
historians working
on
modern and contemporary Europe
- for
example,
on
the origins
of
the First
World War.
For
the
English-speaking historian
it can be
argued that mastery
of
the
historical facts concerning the Chinese Republic requires the use
of
Japanese
almost equally with Chinese. This is because the Japanese panoply of reference
works and research aids is still fully equal,
if
not
in
some respects superior,
to
826
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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS 827
the Chinese. Indications may be found in two survey volumes on
Japanese
studies
of
modern China
- the first dated 'to 1953' by J. K. Fairbank, Masataka
Banno and Sumiko Yamamoto and the second covering 1953 to 1969 by
Noriko Kamachi and others. The more than 2,000 Japanese books and articles
described in these two volumes cite the whole universe of Chinese documenta-
tion.
British and American studies of China are aided by wide access to their
governments' consular and diplomatic correspondence as well as by a large
body of memoirs left by missionary and other residents of China. The lesser
volume of available Soviet documents and memoirs leaves a smaller base for
work on Republican China in the Soviet Union. But the vicissitudes of Soviet
involvement in China, both in the 1920s and in the 1950s, and the problems of
ideology, national interests and diplomatic relations, have all combined to
create a constantly increasing body of Soviet studies of China. The greatest
failure of China scholarship in the Atlantic community has been its inability
to take adequate account of this body of work, even though foreign contact
with Soviet historians of China has, needless to say, been inhibited by the Soviet
authorities.
Since bibliographical essays in CHOC 10 and 11 have provided a considerable
coverage already, we have tried to limit the present survey essays to works
important for the topic covered plus additional items of value. The most eye-
opening view of China's traditional scholarship is provided in Ssu-yii Teng
and Knight Biggerstaff, comps. An annotated bibliography of selected Chinese
reference
works,
3rd edn 1971. It shows the background from which republican
scholarship emerged. The most illuminating and well informed view of the
Ch'ing and other archives inherited by the republic is in Frederic Wakeman,
Jr. ed. Ming and Oing historical studies in the People's Republic of China.
The very extensive project on republican history of the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences in Peking (Beijing) is planned to produce a multi-volumed
narrative History of
Republican China
ca. 1905-49 and several multi-volumed sets
of source materials including chronologies, biographies and primary materials
arranged under some 600 topics! See the report by Barry Keenan in
Chinese
Republican Studies Newsletter 6.1 (Oct. 1980) 18-19.
Andrew Nathan, Modern China, 1840-1972: An introduction to sources and
research
aids,
is a useful bibliographic guide to Chinese and Western materials.
For secondary literature see T. L. Yuan (Yuan T'ung-li), China in Western
literature, and G. W. Skinner, et al., eds. Modern Chinese society: an analytic biblio-
graphy, 3 vols., which has a heavy emphasis on the twentieth century. For an
annotated guide as of 1950 to 1000 Chinese works on the period of the present
volume, see John King Fairbank and Kwang-Ching Liu, Modern China: A
bibliographical guide
to Chinese works, 1898-19)7, corrected reprint, 1961. Recent
listings may be found in the annual
Bibliography
of Asian
Studies
sponsored by
the Association for Asian Studies. The most useful survey of events in English
is by O. Edmund Clubb, 20th
century
China.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
828 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS
Two atlases of the republican period were based both on foreign maps and
on actual surveys conducted by the Chinese Geological Survey under Ting
Wen-chiang and Weng Wen-hao:
Chung-kuo fen-sheng
hsin-ti-t'u (New atlas of
China by provinces; 1933) and
Chung-hua
min-kuo hsin-ti-t'u (New atlas of the
Republic of China; 1934). For coastal provinces, more accurate maps may be
found in county gazetteers compiled during the 1920s, often with the cartogra-
phic discipline acquired from Japan.
In the field of chronology, the most recent Chinese work is that of the found-
ing director of the Modern History Institute of Academia Sinica, Taipei: Kuo
T'ing-i,
Chung-hua
min-kuo
shih-shih jih-chih
(A chronology of the Republic of
China: 1912-25), published posthumously in 1979.
Certain early works may well be noted here, even though they were later
outdated. In the wake of the Nationalist Revolution of 1924-7, for instance, a
group of Chinese scholars with modern disciplines launched a major project
for a series of historical surveys of the epochal changes in the preceding three
decades. Under the aegis of the Pacific (T'ai-p'ing-yang) Bookshop in Shanghai,
the series' most prestigious work was Li Chien-nung, Tsui-chin
san-shih-nien
Chung-kuo cheng-chih
shih (A political history of China in the past thirty years),
published in 1931, enlarged and re-issued in 1947 as
Chung-kuo chin-pai-nien
cheng-chih shih
(A political history of China during the last century); an abridged
English version came out in 1956: S. Y. Teng and J. Ingalls,
The political history
of
China,
1840-1928. Another product of this '30 Years History' project was
Wen Kung-chih (Wen Ti),
Tsui-chin san-shih-nien Chung-kuo chiin-shih
shih (His-
tory of Chinese military affairs in the past thirty years), 2 vols.; it is more com-
prehensive but less meticulous than Ting Wen-chiang's earlier Min-kuo
chiin-
shih
chin-chi
(Recent accounts of the military affairs of the Republic). F. F. Liu,
A military
history
of
modern
China,
1924-1949, supplements the above.
Kinship relations and other kinds of personal 'connections' (kuan-hsi) are
cited in the present volume as playing a role in China's factional politics, in
warlord cliques, and in power relations within the KMT and CCP. Official
biographies of course made up the great bulk of the old dynastic histories.
Modern biographical studies now make possible a fuller exploration of this
important personal-relations level of Chinese life.
Chao Erh-hsun, et al., eds.
Ch'ing-shih
kao (A draft history of the Ch'ing
dynasty),
5
36
chuan,
included useful information on the early republic among the
multitude of biographies. More biographical data are added in the revised edi-
tion edited by Chang Ch'i-yun, Hsiao I-shan and others entitled
Ch'ing-shih
(A history of the Ch'ing dynasty), which also adds an index. A first product
from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences' mammoth compilation project
on republican history is by Li Hsin, et al., eds.
Min-kuo
jen-wu
chuan
(Who's
who of the Republic of China), vol. 1, Peking, 1978. It includes biographical
entries on political, military, cultural and business leaders.
A series of comprehensive biographical dictionaries has been compiled in
English. A. W. Hummel, ed. Eminent
Chinese
of
the Ch'ing
period,
2 vols., comes
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS 829
down to the early republic. Howard L. Boorman and Richard C. Howard, eds.
Biographical dictionary of Republican China, 5 vols., centres on the period. Donald
W. Klein and Ann B. Clark, eds. Biographic dictionary of Chinese communism, 1921-
6f,
2
vols., continues the sequence. More inclusive is Hashikawa Tokio,
Chugoku
bunkakai jimbutsu
sokan
(Biographical dictionary of Chinese cultural personali-
ties).
In the field of full-length modern-style biography, Hu Shih, 'Ting Wen-
chiang ti chuan-chi' (A biography of Ting Wen-chiang), which took 20 years
to complete, was written deliberately as a model for clarity, accuracy and
comprehensiveness. Another landmark on a financier-industrialist was Chou
Chih-an
hsien-sheng
pieh-chuan
(An unorthodox biography of Mr Chou Hsueh-hsi),
by his daughter, Chou Shu-chen, written as a Yenching University master's
thesis.
Shen Yun-lung, a specialist in the maze of personal and factional rela-
tions during the late Ch'ing and early republican periods, has written on two
early republican presidents, Li
Yuan-hung
p'ing-chuan
(A critical biography of Li
Yuan-hung) and Hsu
Shih-ch'ang
p'ing-chuan
(A critical biography of Hsu Shih-
ch'ang).
Nien p'u, annals or chronological records of an individual's career, the tradi-
tional form of biographical compilation, have been used to trace the confusing
and complex personal relationships of leaders in the early republic. For political
history, note San-shui Liang Yen-sun
hsien-sheng
nien-p'u (Annals of Mr Liang Shih-i
of San-shui). For intellectual history as well as early republican politics, re-
searchers have benefited by the publication in 1958 of the monumental Liang
Jen-kung hsien-sheng nien-p'u ch'ang-pien ch'u-kao (Extended annals of Mr Liang
Ch'i-ch'ao, first draft), 3 vols., compiled by Ting Wen-chiang, et al. Other
nien-p'u
compilations have covered a broad range: Tuan Ch'i-jui; T'an Yen-k'ai;
Ma Liang; Wang Kuo-wei. The most elaborate of all nien-p'u have been the
annals of Sun Yat-sen. Based on several earlier works, the Kuomintang Archives
in Taipei have thrice revised and expanded Kuo-fu nien-p'u (A chronological
biography of the Father of the Country; 1958, 1965, 1969). In Canton, a major
project was launched in 1979 to compile even more comprehensive annals
of Sun Yat-sen's career. For Chiang Kai-shek, the authorized Min-kuo
shih-wu
nien i-ch'ien chih Chiang Chieh-shih hsien-sheng (Mr Chiang Kai-shek up to 1926),
in 20 ts'e, comp. by Mao Ssu-ch'eng in the early 1930s, has been reprinted in
Hong Kong. For his canonization, a most elaborate
nien-p'u
has been completed
in 1980, for publication in Taipei, 'Tsung-t'ung Chiang-kung ta-shih ch'ang-
pien' (Extended annals of the important events in President Chiang [Kai-shek's
career]).
Collective biographies include
Ko-ming jen-wu
chih (Biographies of revolu-
tionary figures), a multi-volumed reprint collection, and Wu Hsiang-hsiang,
ed. Min-kuo
pai-jen chuan
(100 biographies of the republican period) in 4 volumes.
The traditional-style biographical sketches in Min Erh-ch'ang, comp. Pei-
chuan chi-pu
(Supplement to the collection of biographies from stone inscrip-
tions),
in 24 ts'e, are often cited in historical studies of the 1912-27 period. For
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
830 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS
personalities in business, see Hsu Ying, ed. Tang-tai
Chung-kuo shih-yeh jen-wu
chih
(Biographies of modern Chinese economic leaders). For regional histories,
a recent example is Chou K'ai-ch'ing, comp. Min-kuo Ssu-ch'uan jen-wu
chuan-chi
(Biographies of republican personalities in Szechwan). Note also two journals,
Kuo-shih-kuan
kuan-k'an (Bulletin of the State History Office or National His-
torical Commission); and
Chuan-chi wen-hsueh
(Biographical literature) in Taipei.
On China's modern publishing industry see the important series of volumes
compiled and annotated by Chang Ching-lu,
Chung-kuo chin-tai ch'u-pan shih-liao
(Historical materials on modern Chinese publications), Ch'u-pien (pt I), 1953;
Erh-pien (pt II), 1954;
Chung-kuo hsien-tai ch'u-pan shih-liao
(Historical materials
on contemporary Chinese publications),
Chia-pien
(pt I), 1954;
1-pien
(pt II),
195
5;
Ping-pien
(pt III), 1956;
Ting-pien
(pt IV), 1959, 2 vols.;
Chung-kuo ch'u-pan
shih-liao
(Historical materials on Chinese publications), Pu-pien (Supplement),
1957.
This supplement to the first and second series came out before the two
volumes of the fourth part of the second series. Publisher: Chung-hua (Peking).
Chow Tse-tsung,
Research guide
to the May Fourth
movement:
intellectual
revolu-
tion in
modern
China, 191J-1924 (1963) describes some 600 periodicals of the
1915-23 period. Also important is CCP, Central Party Committee, Office for
editing and translation of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin, ed.
Wu-ssu
shih-ch'i
ch'i-k'an
chieh-shao
(Introduction to the periodicals of the May
Fourth period), in 3 vols.
Among the most important Chinese documentary compilations, which
cover more topics than the individual bibliographical essays to follow, are
Chin-tai-shih
tzu-liao (Materials on modern history), sponsored by the Institute
of Modern History, Peking, since the 1950s;
Ko-ming wen-hsien
(Documents on
the revolution), sponsored by the National Historical Commission since the
1950s (vols. 1-3, 5—23, 42-00 concern the 1912-27 period);
Chung-kuo
wai-chiao-
shih tzu-liao (Compendia of materials on Chinese diplomatic history), a series
sponsored by the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taipei, based
on the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, open up to 1925.
Among documentary collections in English translation see W. T. deBary
et al., eds.
Sources
of
Chinese
tradition; Ssu-yii Teng and John King Fairbank,
eds.
China's response
to the West; and Milton J. T. Shieh, The
Kuomintang:
selected
historical
documents,
1894-19 49.
For reprints of government gazettes and learned journals, see the Newsletter
of the Center for Chinese Research Materials, Washington, DC; for non-com-
1
munist magazines reprinted in Taiwan, see the catalogues of the Chinese
Materials Center in San Francisco.
Scholarly journals in English include the
Journal
of Asian Studies, The China
Quarterly,
Modern
China,
Modern
Asian
Studies
and
Pacific
Affairs, among others;
in Chinese, the
Bulletin (Chi-k'an)
of the Institute of Modern History, Academia
Sinica, Taipei, and the new
Chin-tai-shihyen-chiu
of the Institute of Modern His-
tory, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Peking; in Japanese,
Kindai Chugoku
Jkenkyu
of Toyo Bunko, among many others. There are, of course, many solid
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS 83 I
research articles in the academic journals
{hsueh-pao')
emanating from universities
in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong as well as from the Chinese mainland.
Occasionally special issues are devoted to symposia on special topics, e.g.
Kuo
Mo-jo yen-chiu chuan
k'an (Special issue on studies of Kuo Mo-jo) in Ssu-
ch'uan ta-hsueh hsueh-pao: che-hsueh she-hui k'o-hsueh pan (Journal of Szechwan
University: philosophy and social sciences), no. 2, 1979. Many centres for
Chinese studies in the Atlantic community issue established series of books or
booklets, usually through their university presses, in numbers too extensive to
pursue here.
2.
ECONOMIC TRENDS, I9I2-49
National economic statistics that are either comprehensive or reliable are a
regrettable lacuna even for twentieth-century China. The Ministry of Agricul-
ture and Commerce of the Peking government did publish a series of annual
statistical tables (Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce,
Nung-shang
t'tmg-chi
piao [Tables of agricultural and commercial statistics; Shanghai, 1914-19;
Peking, 1920-24]). The volumes for 1914 and 1918 are relatively better than
the others; as a whole the data are estimates rather than the products of con-
trolled surveys. Statistical reports were issued, for example, by the national
railways (Ministry of Communications [from 1925 issue, Ministry of Railways,
Bureau of Railway Statistics], Statistics of
government
railways,
i9i;-)6 [from
1922 issue, Statistics of
railways]
[Peking, 1916-28; Nanking, 1931-36]). And
of course the generally excellent foreign trade statistics of the foreign-adminis-
tered Chinese Maritime Customs appeared annually. The customs statistics are
usefully collated, with full references to the original sources, in Hsiao Liang-lin,
China's foreign trade statistics, 1864-1949. For the most part, however, before
1928 the central government was so weak and ineffectual that no systematic
national effort was made to collect economic data.
With the establishment of the Kuomintang Nationalist government, the
statistical situation improved somewhat. The Annual
reports
of the Ministry
of Finance for the years 1928-34 are the only genuine reports on Chinese
national finance ever issued (Ministry of Finance, Annual
reports
for the ijth,
18th,
19th, 11st,
22nd,
and 2)rd fiscal years [Nanking, 1930-6]). For the 1930s
agricultural statistics, including acreage and crop production, were compiled
by the National Agricultural Research Bureau of the Ministry of Industries and
made available in its monthly publication
Nung-ch'ing pao-kao
(Crop reports,
1933-9). These estimates, together with the privately-sponsored work of J. L.
Buck covering the late 1920s and early 1930s at the College of Agriculture,
University of Nanking, are about the best data available on Chinese agriculture
(John Lossing Buck, Land utilization in China: a study of 16,786 farms in 168
localities, and }8,2j6 farm families in twenty-two provinces in China, 1929-j). Vol.
2 presents Buck's statistics in 475 folio pages). The only year for which we have
detailed industrial statistics is 1933. These are the product of
a
large-scale survey
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
832 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS
made by D. K. Lieu for the National Resources Commission of the National
Military Council (Liu Ta-chiin [D. K.
Lieu],
Chung-kuo kung-yeh tiao-ch'a pao-kao
[Report on a survey of China's industry; 3 vols.]). Lieu's data exclude both
Manchuria and foreign-owned factories in China outside of Manchuria. Japa-
nese studies of Manchurian industry are, however, available (see John Young,
The research activities of the South Manchurian Railway Company,
19
07-4;: a history
and
bibliography).
There are also a number of estimates of foreign-owned industry
in China, but none of them is comparable to Lieu's survey. In addition to
government-sponsored collections of statistics, good but fragmentary private
collections of data were carried out by the Nankai Institute of Economics in
Tientsin (mainly price data: see
19
IJ nien-rpj2 nien Nan-k'ai
chih-shu
tzu-liao
hui-pien
[Nankai price indexes, 1913-52]), and in Shanghai by the China Institute
of Economic and Statistical Research (published in its bilingual monthly journal,
Ching-chi
t'ung-chi
yueh-chih
[The Chinese economic and statistical review, 1934-
41]).
Shanghai price indices are collected in Academy of Sciences, Shanghai
Institute of Economic Research, Shang-hai chieh-fang ch'ien-hou wu-chia tzu-liao
hui-pien (1921 nien-iyjj
nien)
(Collected materials on Shanghai prices before
and after Liberation, 1921-57).
Although in quantity and quality they were much superior to pre-1928 data,
the economic statistics of the Kuomintang period still leave much to be desired,
in part because China was still far from being politically unified; in part because
a large proportion of economic activity continued to be carried on outside of
any market transactions and thus could not easily be measured; and finally
because of the continued technical backwardness of the statistical services. But
even the relatively deficient data of 1928-37 are a godsend when compared to
what is available thereafter. War and civil war did not spare statistical collection
any more than other parts of the administrative organization. For 1937-49,
macrodata of any kind, apart from fiscal and monetary statistics, are scarce and
unreliable. Chang Kia-ngau, The
inflationary
spiral:
the experience
of
China,
19)9-
jo includes data available only to the author, who was governor of the Central
Bank of China.
The statistical publications that I have noted are, of course, only examples.
There was more - the publications of the Ministry of Industry and the Bureau
of Foreign Trade of the Nanking government, for instance, or the rural surveys
prepared for the Executive Yuan's Rural Recovery Commission and the com-
prehensive mineral output data for China proper and Manchuria published by
the Geological Survey of China. In addition to these official reports, Chinese
and Japanese researchers (the latter mainly on behalf of the South Manchurian
Railway Company) produced hundreds of fragmentary local studies. But none
of these individually - nor all of them collectively - supply or easily permit
the derivation of the comprehensive data on population, employment, capital
stock, national product and expenditure, prices, taxation, monetary flows and
the like, which the economic historian might use for a definitive analysis of
China's economy in the first half of the twentieth century. The introductory
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