The Tang–Song Transition in Chinese Economic History

Summary

At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese scholars eager to assimilate the historical sciences of the West and incorporate their history into universal historical narratives readily adopted the tripartite periodization of Western civilization divided into ancient, medieval, and modern epochs. This framework of linear, stadial progression toward modernity offered liberal intellectuals in China the promise of emancipation from China’s stultifying past and rebirth as full citizens in a modern world of equal nation-states. Marxist scholars invoked a parallel tripartite periodization divided into slave, feudal, and capitalist epochs, but adapted to accentuate the defining feature of Chinese history: the rise of a “bureaucratic, centralized feudal state” that fostered “economic stagnation” throughout the longue durée of the imperial era, from the first universal empire of Qin in the third century bce to the irruption of Western imperialism in the nineteenth century.¹ The ideas of “oriental stagnation” and the “Asiatic mode of production” likewise inflected Western historiography on China, and the notion of an unchanging “traditional China” prior to the advent of the West in the post-Opium War era predominated in Western scholarship on Chinese history down to the 1970s.