If one believed the numbers on wikipedia, it seems like Chinese growth was also accelerating a ton and it was not really far behind on the IR, such that I wouldn’t except to be able to easily eyeball the differences.
I believe the population surge is closely related to the European population surge: it’s largely attributed to the Colombian exchange + expanded markets/trade. One of the biggest things is that there’s an expansion in the land under cultivation, since potatoes and maize can be grown on marginal land that wouldn’t otherwise work well for rice or wheat, and (probably) a decline in living standards that’s offsetting the rise in population. From the book 1493 (ch. 5):
Neither rice nor wheat, China’s two most important staples, would grow in the shack people’s marginal land. The soil was too thin for wheat; on steep slopes, the irrigation for rice paddies requires building terraces, the sort of costly, hugely laborious capital improvement project unlikely to be undertaken by renters. Almost inevitably, they turned to American crops: maize, sweet potato, and tobacco. Maize (Zea mays) can thrive in amazingly bad land and grows quickly, maturing in less time than barley, wheat, and millet. Brought in from the Portuguese at Macao, it was known as “tribute wheat,” “wrapped grain,” and “jade rice.” Sweet potatoes will grow where even maize cannot, tolerating strongly acid soils with little organic matter and few nutrients....
In their quest for social stability, the Ming had prohibited people from leaving their home regions. Reversing course, the Qing actively promoted a westward movement. Much as the United States encouraged its citizens to move west in the nineteenth century and Brazil provided incentives to occupy the Amazon in the twentieth, China’s new Qing masters believed that filling up empty spaces was essential to the national destiny.… Lured by tax subsidies and cheap land, migrants from the east swarmed into the western hills.… They looked at the weathered, craggy landscape, so unwelcoming to rice—and they, too, planted American crops....
The amount of cropland soared, followed by the amount of food grown on that cropland, and then the population.
There’s obviously a major risk of hindsight bias here, but I think there’s almost a consensus among economic historians that China wasn’t on track toward an industrial revolution anytime soon. There aren’t really signs of innovation picking up during this period: “the prosperity engendered by quantitative growth in output masked the lack of significant innovation in productive technologies” (The Economic History of China, p. 336). Estimates seem to vary widely, and I don’t know what the error bars are here, but the favored estimates in TECHC (taken from a Chinese-language paper by Liu Ti) also show the industrial sector of the economy actually shrinking by half between 1600 and 1840 and real per-capita incomes shrinking by about a quarter.
It’s also a common view that China was entering a period of decline at the start of the nineteenth century (partly due to population pressure and ecological damage from land conversion). From the same book (p. 361):
[T]he economic growth of the nineteenth century could not be sustained indefinitely. There is considerable evidence that the Chinese economy had seriously begun to exhaust its productive capacities by 1800.
Basically, I think the story is that: There was another 2-3 century “efflorescence” in China, but it wasn’t really associated with either technological innovation or an expansion of industry. The total population growth numbers were probably unusually big, relative to other efflorescences, but this doesn’t imply that this was an unusually innovative period; the unusual size of the surge may just reflect the fact that there was a black-swan-ish ecological event (the sudden transfer of several New World crops) around the start of the period. The growth surge was unsustainable, as all previous growth surges had been, and China was on track to fall back down to a lower level of development.
We will never know whether without the rise of the West, the Orient would have been able to replicate something similar, given enough time. It seems unlikely, but there is no way of knowing if they would have stumbled upon steam power or the germ theory of disease. It is true that the consensus of modern scholarship has remained of the opinion that by 1800 the bulk of output in Chinese industry employed a technology very little different from that under the Song (Richardson, 1999, pp. 54–55). At the level of the economy as a whole, this is an overstatement: Chinese agriculture adopted new crops such as peanuts and sweet potatoes, some of which were introduced by the intercontinental ecological arbitrage practiced by European explorers in the sixteenth century. Stagnation is therefore too strong a word, but comparing Chinese technological achievements not only with those of the West but also with its own successes during the Song clearly indicates a decelerating progress. Elvin (1996, p. 93), after studying the missed opportunities of hydraulic technology adoption in China, concludes that there were strong and perceived needs, and few constraints in adopting such techniques. And yet there was minimal advance. China’s technological somnolence was rudely interrupted by the exposure to Western technology in the nineteenth century.
(I don’t really buy an overall take like “It seems unlikely” but it doesn’t feel that mysterious to me where the difference in take comes from. From the super zoomed out perspective 1200 AD is just yesterday from 1700AD, it seems like random fluctuations over 500 years are super normal and so my money would still be on “in 500 years there’s a good chance that China would have again been innovating and growing rapidly, and if not then in another 500 years it’s reasonably likely...” It makes sense to describe that situation as “nowhere close to IR” though. And it does sound like the super fast growth is a blip.)
I believe the population surge is closely related to the European population surge: it’s largely attributed to the Colombian exchange + expanded markets/trade. One of the biggest things is that there’s an expansion in the land under cultivation, since potatoes and maize can be grown on marginal land that wouldn’t otherwise work well for rice or wheat, and (probably) a decline in living standards that’s offsetting the rise in population. From the book 1493 (ch. 5):
There’s obviously a major risk of hindsight bias here, but I think there’s almost a consensus among economic historians that China wasn’t on track toward an industrial revolution anytime soon. There aren’t really signs of innovation picking up during this period: “the prosperity engendered by quantitative growth in output masked the lack of significant innovation in productive technologies” (The Economic History of China, p. 336). Estimates seem to vary widely, and I don’t know what the error bars are here, but the favored estimates in TECHC (taken from a Chinese-language paper by Liu Ti) also show the industrial sector of the economy actually shrinking by half between 1600 and 1840 and real per-capita incomes shrinking by about a quarter.
It’s also a common view that China was entering a period of decline at the start of the nineteenth century (partly due to population pressure and ecological damage from land conversion). From the same book (p. 361):
Basically, I think the story is that: There was another 2-3 century “efflorescence” in China, but it wasn’t really associated with either technological innovation or an expansion of industry. The total population growth numbers were probably unusually big, relative to other efflorescences, but this doesn’t imply that this was an unusually innovative period; the unusual size of the surge may just reflect the fact that there was a black-swan-ish ecological event (the sudden transfer of several New World crops) around the start of the period. The growth surge was unsustainable, as all previous growth surges had been, and China was on track to fall back down to a lower level of development.
EDIT: One more quote, from A Culture of Growth (p. 317; emph. mine):
Thanks, super helpful.
(I don’t really buy an overall take like “It seems unlikely” but it doesn’t feel that mysterious to me where the difference in take comes from. From the super zoomed out perspective 1200 AD is just yesterday from 1700AD, it seems like random fluctuations over 500 years are super normal and so my money would still be on “in 500 years there’s a good chance that China would have again been innovating and growing rapidly, and if not then in another 500 years it’s reasonably likely...” It makes sense to describe that situation as “nowhere close to IR” though. And it does sound like the super fast growth is a blip.)