In her broad and bold Economic Thought in Modern China, Margherita Zanasi refutes the conventional understanding that a statist model of economic development is deeply rooted in Chinese history. Instead, she shows that ideas central to economic liberalism, such as those of a self-regulating market and the positive role of consumption in the economy, emerged in China's intellectual landscape more than a century before their appearance in Europe (p. 2). However, as China faced mounting pressures of imperialist encroachment, rapid population growth, and resource constraints in the nineteenth century, the pro-market, pro-consumption discourse became marginalized. In its stead rose the self-strengthening reformers’ promotion of developmental state and the Chinese Nationalist Government's New Life Movement, which curtailed market forces, suppressed consumption, and prioritized heavy industry output. Although the Nationalists lost the Chinese Civil War, part of their economic legacy ironically lived on under its Communist rivals, evidenced by the chronical consumer austerity and the 1958–61 famine under Mao.
Zanasi deftly navigates through more than four centuries of intellectual history by anchoring her analysis of Chinese economic discourse on the concept of minsheng (people's livelihood). Originating in Confucianism, the minsheng mandate had consistently been a central concern for Chinese rulers, who regarded protecting and improving people's livelihood as the foundation for political legitimacy and social stability. The minsheng idea was adopted, reinterpreted, and radically redefined by the Ming, Qing, and Republican authorities in their efforts to negotiate their relations with private interests.
Chapter 1 shows “the pro-market tendencies in Confucianism” through a meticulous reading of the classic texts, such as the Debate on Salt and Iron (p. 50). Zanasi finds that in contrast with the Legalists’ advocacy of state intervention, Confucian humanists regarded excessive state extraction as more damaging to people's livelihood than the predatory behaviors of private businessmen (pp. 27–28). Chapter 2 turns to the mid-1500s, when the Ming dynasty experienced “a commercial revolution comparable to that which began in the late seventeenth-century Europe” (p. 2). As the Jiangnan/Lower Yangtze region enjoyed economic prosperity, discourse about the self-regulating market and the wealth-generating benefits of luxury consumption flourished (p. 51). During the Ming-Qing transition, Ming loyalists used the minsheng mandate as a discursive weapon to attack the Manchus’ alien rule. These Han intellectuals alleged that the Qing system of state monopolies, special licensing, and brokerage disrupted the “natural” mechanism of Chinese economy, obstructed fair market competition, and threatened economic stability (pp. 58–59).
Chapters 3 and 4 delineate the emergence of the “frugal modernity” from the Self-Strengthening Movement to the early decades of the Republic of China. In the late Qing, progressive officials and intellectuals mobilized the minsheng discourse to channel capital toward state-led modernization projects to combat Western imperialism and remedy China's growing trade deficit (p. 142). Nationalism motivated the reformers to denounce the consumption of imported luxury goods and encourage that of everyday made-in-China goods (p. 194). Zanasi highlights that these policies reflect the Chinese elites’ “sophisticated” understanding—ahead of their European counterparts—of the “elasticity of both production and consumption” and their attempt to boost domestic production in key industrial sectors by regulating consumption (p. 112). Sun Yat-sen famously incorporated minsheng to his Three Principles of the People, emphasizing that the state, not the market, bore primary responsibility to meeting the people's basic economic needs (pp. 167, 184). Under Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalists’ mingsheng principle assumed a more authoritarian, anti-consumerist dimension. Chiang reframed mingsheng not as the need for the government to improve the people's standard of living, but as the need for the people to align their consumer behaviors with the state's economic objectives. In other words, Chiang “hijacked” Confucian moral values to demand individual sacrifices in material consumption for the goal of constructing a centralized, militarized and industrialized economy.
In her nuanced analysis, Zanasi skillfully presents minsheng not as a monolithic ideology but a highly debated and deeply contextual concept. While the book ends at the verge of the Second Sino-Japanese war, it provides much food for thought in the recent debates about consumerism during the Mao era and the origins of China's reform.Footnote 1 She reminds us that beyond a narrow focus on the statist turn in the Chinese political economy in the twentieth century, we need to consider the convoluted evolution of Chinese economic thoughts. By adopting a longue durée approach, she frames the relationship between pro-state and pro-market trends of economic discourse not as a fixed binary but as fluid coexistence and coevolution in interactive and complementary ways (pp. 3–4).
Written in concise and clear prose, the book succeeds in its careful deliberation on China-West comparisons and connections and its critical engagement with concepts from contemporary macroeconomics—an academic discipline that first developed in the West and was heavily influenced by European experiences. By showing that China pioneered both a commercial revolution and an accompanying intellectual movement toward economic liberalism, the book puts forward a powerful rebuttal against a cultural essentialist reading of Chinese political economy and stereotypes about early modern Chinese intellectual discourse as being immobile and stagnated (pp. 95–97). The book also shines in its efforts to include a diverse demography in intellectual discourse, as Zanasai taps a wide range of sources, including a young woman college student's commentary on consumption (p. 164). Economic Thought in Modern China will appeal to scholars in the fields of history, economics and philosophy. The book sets new standards for understanding indigenous Chinese economic thoughts in their own cultural, political, and historical contexts while paying keen attention to convergences and divergences between China and West.
