Introduction
To discuss the issues raised by the title of this essay requires us to think of four types of change. These are:
1. The changing realities of the economy.
2. The possibilities for assessing and analysing these realities.
3. The background, training and chosen methodologies of those working in this field.
4. The role of The China Quarterly in selecting and encouraging particular types of work.
This essay can only hint at some of the themes suggested by this agenda. However, the magnitude of the problem – that is the scale of change that we are trying to grasp – is underlined for me by a photograph that appears on the front cover of a special issue on Sino-Japanese relations. Taken in the late 1980s at a famous bend of the Grand Canal, we see a tranquil commercial scene of laden boats, peasant agriculture, and a distant prospect of the city of Suzhou wreathed in factory smoke. Four years ago I tried to find this perspective again, but the construction and development of the intervening decade and a half made this completely impossible. It is this almost unimaginable transformation with its physical, institutional and psychological aspects, that reading The China Quarterly helps us to understand.Footnote 1
Statistics
There is much more to economics than statistics, but without them we lack a starting point and the means for persuasive verification of our ideas. In the 1960s and 1970s, China Quarterly authors were faced with the problem that while relatively detailed official data were available for 1952–57, no usable macro data were published for 20 years after 1958. In this period of statistical drought, therefore, we find three kinds of articles. First, are those that mainly focus on squeezing as much as possible out of the earlier material. Choh ming-Li, Robert Michael Field and Kenneth Walker appeared regularly as major practitioners in this type of work. Walker was particularly successful in pioneering the use of local newspaper sources to throw light on local, primarily provincial economies. A second approach is the kind made by Joseph Alsop and Werner Klatt who attempted to follow the events of the Great Leap and its aftermath by using fragmentary data and indirect methods of estimation. Both authors took a negative view of the events and the intrinsically speculative nature of this approach made for sharp controversy.Footnote 2 Finally, John Aird writing on population and my reconstruction of the Shanghai housing problem were examples of attempts to combine the firmer earlier material with later, incomplete but seemingly usable information. Aird's particular strength was that he evaluated data in the light of a close examination of the administrative machinery that had produced it, and that he could draw on important modelling work developed at the Princeton Office of Population Research and on the strengths of other Washington based scholars attached to the Bureau of the Census such as Leo Orleans and Irene Taeuber.Footnote 3
As data became available after 1978, Werner Klatt noted with satisfaction that US-based estimates of national income appeared to be substantially higher than adjusted official ones, but the main story after the opening and reform was the disappearance of critical interest in statistical material – the subject which had absorbed so much money and research time for nearly two decades. Most authors were happy just to ride the tsunami of new data coming out of official sources.
One of the most interesting trends in the past decade has been the rediscovery of the “statistics problem.” Encouraged partly by major official re-evaluations, Carsten Holz, Dorothy Solinger and most recently, Lily Tsai, have each made important contributions to this topic.Footnote 4
Economic Themes and Approaches
For many years The China Quarterly relied heavily on a core group of economists. This included Robert Michael Field, K. C. Yeh, Kenneth Walker, Nicholas Lardy, Y. Y. Kueh, Tatsu Kambara, John Aid and Judith Banister. These authors appear in many issues and in spite of the difficulties they faced, their work is of uniformly reliable quality. K. C. Yeh specialized in national income analysis and the others each had a specific sectoral interest: industry, agriculture, energy, population, etc. Any reader of the journal needing an authoritative, independent appraisal of current trends and policy issues could turn to these articles and Special Issues and find it.Footnote 5
As the reform got under way, new authors began to appear and new questions about the economy were asked. Notable among the “straight” economists was Barry Naughton, who had already mined the 1960s material to make an important revision of our ideas about the starting point of the reform economy, and who then went on to major research on the reform itself.Footnote 6 Another post-reform change was the appearance of contributions from scholars based in China. As early as 1980 The China Quarterly published an article by Dong Fureng. Dong was a well-known CASS economist, trained in the Soviet school, and his article revealed something of the thinking and debates of the early reform period. Although he relied mainly on conventional, rather clichéd political explanations of the past, Dong did discuss the rationale of “Readjustment.” He also underlined the significance of China's extremely low share of world exports (0.7 per cent) and the enormous potential to transform this. More recently, two scholars from the Party School joined a symposium that reconsidered the High Tide of 1955, to which they contributed a paper and threw interesting light on contemporary Chinese debates about Mao's errors of ‘over hasty rashness’ in pursuing the General Line, the High Tide and eventually the Great Leap.Footnote 7
The institutional revolution since 1980 has worked in two ways. First, the emergence of private, cooperative, joint venture and hybrid forms of ownership has presented writers on the economy with many new challenges. The Chinese “firm,” for example, now appears in articles on the ‘Wenzhou model’ and in explorations of different kinds of capitalism. Here, new parallels between the “clan capitalism” found in contemporary China and similar structures observed in Western Europe can be identified. These articles are thus beginning to move China off its shelf of “uniqueness” and into the mainstream of world comparative systems.Footnote 8
The second effect is equally striking and this has been the interest taken in the economy by non-economists. The legal aspects of the economy have been a regular topic for China Quarterly authors, but the significance of law has grown with the consolidation of the Chinese legal system and the importance of foreign private investors.Footnote 9 Equally striking has been the arrival of sociologists and political economists in the economics field. This reflects a widespread disciplinary shift, particularly in “development” studies, a hybrid field which at its best is wonderful, but at its worst confusing and unsatisfactory. The China Quarterly has attracted some of the best scholars in the field, including Andrew Walder, Jean Oi, Vivienne Shue, Ryosei Kokubun and Wong Siu-lun. This group has added a completely new dimension to China Quarterly articles on the economy and moved us on from what was perhaps an excessive concern with approaches that reflected pressures from contemporary academic peers and bureaucratic paymasters.
Two other points are worth noting. One is the growing evidence in The China Quarterly of interest in Hong Kong, Taiwan and in “post-colonial” topics relating to the East Asian region as a whole. By publishing in these wider fields, The China Quarterly is helping to bring China studies out of its rather narrow geographical box.Footnote 10 The significance of place and location to our understanding economic development has been brought back into mainstream thinking in recent years, and this means that Chinese economic studies require a wider geographical vision than we have had in the past.
The other point that strikes one on re-reading the journal is the value of the “long review” and the “review essay.”Footnote 11 Critical discussions are an essential dynamic in all academic fields. If these are restricted to verbal exchanges at small, exclusive style conferences, or to expression in fleeting electronic modes, they cannot fulfil their function. The publication of debate in widely available hard copy is one of the most important functions of The China Quarterly.
Conclusion
The transformation of the Chinese economy as seen through The China Quarterly is remarkable. In the first two decades, many articles on the subject were written by scholars who could not visit China and relied on published materials or informants. Linkages with scholars in China were negligible. All this has changed, as has the disciplinary range of authors now available to write for The China Quarterly. It remains to ask whether we have in fact lost anything. In the field of economics, I suggest that we have. As argued above, for many years The China Quarterly provided scholars and non-academic readers with regular, comprehensive analyses of the main economic trends and issues. This is not now the case. Yet the need for it is arguably greater than ever. There are two pertinent reasons why the quality of the earlier material was so good. One was precisely that there was so little mutual contact between analysts and China, and another was that the US Government agencies needed accuracy above all. The re-engagement with China has transformed research possibilities, but at the same time has created a huge network of mutual dependencies in the public, private and academic sectors which, in my view, inevitably tends to corrupt participants. Further, recent decades have seen a trend towards the marketization of academic life and dependence on corporate support.Footnote 12 This is increasingly the case even within China where, it was suggested last summer, it is hard to find a single economist immune to the impact of vested interests – notably property interests.Footnote 13 All of this makes independent views so very valuable. Further, while it is true that our new multi-disciplinary knowledge has greatly increased our understanding of the dynamics of economic change, we still need the basic factual results from which to assess the past and try to think about the future.
