Why Asians are different from (Latin) Americans
In a recent speech Zhou Xiaochuan gave a nice clear summary of the reasons for Asian economic exceptionalism and the cultural (and therefore apparently mostly u...
Category: Economics
Ming Dynasty tax revolt
Historians write a lot about taxes, in part because we are often interested in states and what they do, and taxes are something that states do a lot of. Taxatio...
The end of export-led growth?
I don’t post much about current affairs1 but the current Chinese stimulus package seems worth talking about. To forestall the possibility of an economic d...
China under construction
Apparently China produces a lot of cement From the Oil Drum, via Andrew Sullivan, Another in our series of cool teaching graphics.
It's the shoes
For people who have read Sherman Cochran it is not news that Chinese merchants developed brand names and consumers developed brand loyalty. Cochran mostly focus...
Needling Needham
The Needham Question is hot, hot, hot! Thanks to Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked t...
Qing China's modern economy
Shanghaist among others reports on Asia’s growing rice crisis. Well, actually it’s only a crisis if you are trying to live on less than a dollar a day. Mu...
Comparative Colonialism-Taiwan
Japan Focus has a nice article by Anne Booth on Japanese colonialism in Taiwan (and Korea) The standard view is that the post-war development of both places ha...
How to get rich in Chinese business
This is from the Hawai’i Reader in Traditional Chinese Culture1 It is a wonderful reading to use in classes, as our hero Dou Yi manages to make dough in p...
The Chinese are way more advanced than the Americans
Geoff Wade sent a long message to H-Asia detailing the current status of the raising of the Nanhai1, a large Song dynasty (or maybe Ming dynasty, accounts vary)...
A tame civil society in China?
Via Kevin Drum (where the comments so far are better than you might expect) a link to an article by Christina Larson in the new Washington Monthly about environ...
It's a -very large- stuffed panda
As a visual aid for Charles’s post below I would like to add this.
The emperor did care about the well-being of the peasants
From Oddnumbers1 a post on historical income inequality, which is based on this paper One of the things that they conclude is that China in the 188o’s was...
Take grain as the key link
Securing grain supplies and providing food security for the peasants was always one of the main duties of the Chinese state, partly because of their deep concer...