A History of Chinese Civilization

…by Jacques Gernet.

From one of the amazon reviews: “If you compare this book to its obvious competitors (e.g. Valerie Hansen’s Open Empire, Schirokauer’s Brief History of Chinese Civilization), you have to be amazed at the relatively low list price–especially considering that the publisher, Cambridge University Press, is not famous for selling cheap books. If you can buy only one textbook history of China, this one is worth considering for that reason alone.”

Cambridge University Press is also not famous for selling crappy books, and combine that observation with the remarks above and you have a big part of the reason why I bought it. Judging from what I’ve read so far it’s a good book with a reasonable amount of details, all things considered (there’s a lot of ground to cover here…). Some stuff from the book:

i. “The cart with a pole and two horses harnessed with a neck-yoke gave way at the time of the Warring States to the cart with two shafts. And it seems that at the same time the neck-yoke – which was to remain for a very long time the only method of harnessing known in the rest of the world – was replaced by the breast harness. This new device, and also the horse-collar, which was to appear between the fifth and ninth centuries A.D., were important pieces of progress in the field of animal traction. By freeing the horses from the pressure of the yoke, which tended to choke them, they made driving easier and rendered it possible to pull heavier loads. One single horse would suffice where formerly two or sometimes even four were required. It is noteworthy that the casting of iron and more rational methods of harnessing, attested in the Chinese world at the time of the Warring States, both appear in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages.”

ii. “Although the Han founder considerably softened the extreme harshness of the penal laws of the first empire, the political and administrative organization that Liu Pang put in place differed little from that of the Ch’in. We find the same division of the territory into commanderies (chün) and prefectures (hsien), and the same tripartite division of functions both in the capital and in the provinces: civil affairs, military affairs, and inspection and supervision of the administration. In short the same ‘Legalist’ empire was perpetuated not only in the territories directly dependent on the central power, but also in the ‘fiefs’ (feng-kuo) granted first to the founder’s companions-in-arms and later to relatives of the imperial family. Its power was based on the direct control of the peoples and individuals by the state. This implies recourse to accurate censuses, and in fact those which have been preserved from the Han period are reckoned to be among the most precise in history. Every subject was liable to a personal tax payable in coin (this tax was levied even on children of tender years), to annual stints of forced labour and to military service. In addition, the Legalist system of rewards and punishments [...] made it possible to classify the whole population in the continuous hierachy of the twenty-four degrees of dignity (chüeh). [...] The use of the passport, the antecendents of which go back to the age of the Warring States, is well attested in the Han period [206 BCE – 220 CE], as is the use of police dogs.”

iii. “the hold of the central power was firmest where the settlement was most recent; in the long-settled regions the imperial administration had to come to terms with the great families. [...] This sheds light on one of the main reasons for transfers of population: it was in the state’s interest to move influential families, to shift them from their surroundings, in order to rob them of all power. Similarly, it was also in the state’s interest to extend the areas of land clearance and colonization, for it is easier to keep in hand a population consisting of displaced persons – convicts, freedmen, soldiers, and bankrupt peasants. [...] a big effort was made to colonize the north-western regions, and the number of people settled there in the reign of the emperor Wu Ti [141-87] may be estimated at two million. A few figures will suffice to bring home the scale of these transfers of population. In 127, 100,000 peasants were settled in Shuo-fang [...] in 102, 180,000 soldier-farmers went off to people the Chiu-ch’üan and Chang-yeh commanderies; and in 120,after big floods in western Shantung, 700,000 victims of the disaster were transferred to Shensi. These transfers of population were numerous enough to affect the distribution of the population in North China…”

iv. “Like the Ch’in, the first Han rulers pursued a policy of undertaking big public works, the majority of which were strategic or economic in character. In 192 and 190 B.C. peasants and their womenfolk from the valley of the Wei were conscripted for the construction of the walls of the new capital, Ch’ang-an. In each of these two years there were nearly 150,000 people at work. [...] In 132 B.C. 100,000 soldiers were drafted to repair a breach in the dykes of the Yellow Rver. [...] Besides ramparts and forts, canals and roads were also built. These reinforced the hold of the central power on the regions but also corresponded to economic needs. In 129 B.C. ninety miles of canal were dug between Honan and Shensi to connect the basin of the Wei with the Yellow River; 95 B.C. saw the opening of a canal some sixty miles long linking the course of the Wei to that of the Chiang further north. But innumerable irrigation works were carried out in the whole of North China during the reigns of Wu Ti and his immediate successors.”

v. “It would be simplistic to see in the Great Walls a sharp divide between the world of the nomadic cattle-raisers and that of the Chinese farmers and townspeople. The northern frontiers of the Chinese world formed a zone where the opposing modes of life of the farmer and the herdsman mingled and combined. Down the centuries sometimes the pasturages would advance and the cultivated land shrink, sometimes the arid lands would be conquered and developed by the sedentary peoples. Just as certain tribes of herdsmen changed over to agriculture, so some Han adopted the nomads’ mode of life. [... an example:] A defeat incurred by the Chinese armies in 201-200 [B.C.] caused a general retreat south of the Great Walls which lasted until about 135 [B.C.]. [...] The organization of the Han armies and defence system on the northern frontier is fairly well known to us thanks to the discovery of a substantial number of manuscript texts on wood and bamboo and to the excavations carried out on the Chinese limes in the Han period since the beginning of the century. [...] About 10,000 in number, they consist of reports, communiqués, inventories, soldiers’ letters, fragments of legal texts, and so on. [...] The dates mentioned in them run from about 100 B.C. to A.D. 100. [...]

Look-out duty, patrols, and training occupied a considerable part of the time of the troops serving in the first line of defence. Each post was in permanent contact with neighbouring posts and with the rear, thanks to a system of signals: red and blue flags, smoke by day and fires by night, rendered more easily visible by long pivoting poles rather like Egyptian shadoofs. This system of signals, which made possible, thanks to a fairly complex code, the swift transmission of relatively precise information about troop movements and attacks, is mentioned in the texts as early as 166 B.C. All messages sent and received were recorded in writing. The head of each post was obliged by a very formalistic administrative routine to write a large number of letters and to keep extensive records which deal not only with military activities but also with victualling and the weapons kept in magazine – bows, arrows, crossbows, and catapults.”

vi. “one of the most frequent practices in the Han age was that of sending hostages (chih) to the imperial court. As a token of their loyalty, princes of central Asian kingdoms and leaders of tribal confederations would offer their own sons, who were lavishly entertained in the capital at the emperor’s expense, received a Chinese education and were often appointed to posts in the imperial guards or in the domestic administration of the palace. Having been converted to the mode of life and culture of the Chinese, when they returned to their own countries they acted as agents of Han influence. Besides forming a guarantee against the breaking of alliances, the hostage system also provided a means of interfering more easily in the dynastic affairs of the countries allied with China.”

vii. “The progress in iron metallurgy continued under the Han. One has to wait until the sixth century A.D. to find a description of an open hearth process, the ancestor of the Modern Siemens-Martin process, but the Chinese could produce steel as early as the second century A.D. by heating and working together irons with different carbon contents. [...] The reign of Wang Mang (9-23) saw the appearance of the water mill. [...] We have written evidence of wheelbarrow in Szechwan in the third century A.D., but figurative representations of it go back to the first and second centuries. [...]

“When the state monopoly in iron and salt was instituted in 117 B.C., forty-eight foundries were established by the government, each of which employed a labour force of some hundreds to a thousand workers. [...] Outside the two big sectors of salt and iron, where in any case the state monopoly was strictly enforced for less than a century, private and public enterprises existed side by side. The same is true of silk weaving. [...] One of the social peculiarities of the Han period as a whole was in fact the existence of very rich families who combined agricultural enterprises [...] with industrial undertakings (cloth mills, foundries, lacquer factories) and commercial businesses, and who had at their disposal a very large labour force. [...] The Cho family, one of the richest in Ch’eng-tu, owned huge expanses of cultivated land, fish-ponds, and game parks. It possessed ironworks and steelworks in which it employed 800 slave workers and grew rich through the iron trade…”

China’s marriage market

I decided to start out with this:

…in order to illustrate that you could probably write a not too dissimilar post about other countries as well. Also, it’s a nice image. Image credit: Wikipedia. “Description: Sex ratio total population. Pink = Female higher than male, Green = Equal, Blue = Male higher than female.”

This post will only deal with China. Here’s some related stuff about India.

So anyway, I was skimming a few world bank working papers and I found this one (pdf), which I decided to cover in a bit of detail here. It’s called China’s Marriage Market and Upcoming Challenges for Elderly Men and it’s written by Monica Das Gupta, Avraham Ebenstein & Ethan Jennings Sharygin. Some stuff from the paper:

“The Chinese census in 2005 reflected a staggering sex ratio at birth of 119, implying that each year there are roughly 1 million more boys born than girls.3 For cohorts born between 1985 and 2005, we estimate that there are 27 million more men than women4, implying a large number of men will fail to marry. [...]

We demonstrate two key facts regarding the Chinese marriage market using historical census microdata from 1990 and 2000. First, economic status is a crucial predictor of marital probability for men in China. We use years of education as the closest proxy for status, and document that while there is almost universal marriage for highly educated men, lower rates of marriage prevail among men of lower education. By contrast, the marriage market for women cleared: women across the educational distribution enjoy nearly universal marriage, and are able to engage in hypergamy, choosing spouses of higher status and income. Second, since many women migrate for the purpose of marriage, it seems very likely that in the coming decades the collapse of marital prospects for men will occur in poor areas of the country with low educational attainment. [...]

The results paint a grim picture for China’s ability to care for these men under the current policy structure of social assistance and social insurance programs that are primarily locally funded (Wang 2006, World Bank 2009). We estimate that in the absence of major redistribution of education and employment opportunities across China, the marriage squeeze will be in China’s poorer regions with large minority populations.7 Thus it will not necessarily be the more prosperous eastern regions of China with the most skewed sex ratio at birth that will experience high marriage failure rates among men. Rather, the poorer provinces ─ with more balanced sex ratios at birth ─ will bear a disproportionate share of the social and economic burden of China’s unmarried and childless men.”

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How big is the difference in marriage rates between the successful males and the not quite so successful males, I hear you ask? Well, the paper states that: “over 98% of college graduates successfully marry by age 35 whereas the proportion is under 90% for men with less than a primary education.” One way to look at those numbers is that ‘that’s actually not that big of a difference’ – it’s around 9 out of 10 or more in both cases, right? But who are we actually comparing again? – another way to look at that is that males with less than a primary education are more than 5 times as likely to not succesfully marry by age 35. To me, that sounds like a huge difference, and it’s expected to get even worse over time: “over 10 percent of men with less than primary school education aged 30+ in 2030 are projected never to marry, and this figure increases to almost half in 2050″. Of course one might argue that economic growth increases mobility (so that even poor men might be able to move to find females willing to marry them) and ‘historical data are historical data’ which perhaps shouldn’t be given as much weight, given how much Chinese society has changed over the past decades. But rural China is still very poor and it isn’t growing very much compared to the rest – many of the people who have not left already for the urban provinces are people who can’t afford to, and they can’t really afford to save either so there’s not in my mind any compelling reason to think they will be able to afford to move in the future. Incidentally, it’s not really that hard to set up a model where you have decreased mobility over time even though the poor group has a positive net savings rate. Property prices are functions of local economic conditions, and if an area experiences significant income growth whereas another area does not and the people living in the poorer area are neither able to save enough money over time to at least keep up with the income growth of the richer area nor can afford to move there in the short run, the relative property price differential and the costs of moving will go up over time, even though the poor single guy might have a significant positive net savings rate. A very simplified model illustrating this could go along these lines:

Average income of ‘poor area’ residents: 10.
Average income of ‘rich area’ residents: 100.
Poor area income growth rate: 0%.
Rich area income growth rate: 10%

I shall assume that income growth rates and housing price growth rates are identical. In reality, housing prices are probably growing faster than income for the relevant demographic in the rich area and slower than income in the poor area. Let’s say the poor guy saves 20% of his income/year, i.e. 2 mu (‘monetary units’)/period. Say he invests that money in the rich area, earning 10%/year. After 10 years, he’ll have saved ~35 mu. How much will a house in the rich area that used to cost 100 mu cost after 10 years? 259. At the beginning, the poor guy was 98 mu short of being able to buy a house in the rich area – after ten years he’s now more than 200 mu short, even though he had a very high savings rate given his income and even though he earned a quite nice return on investment during that period. The property price differential was 90 mu to begin with, it’s 249 mu after 10 years. Maybe the effect sizes won’t be as large as assumed in the paper, but some of the dynamics described in the paper will probably play out to some degree.

Some more numbers and stuff related to these remarks from the paper:

“Poverty in China is heavily concentrated in the rural areas. Different measures of poverty all paint the same picture: while nearly 30 percent of the rural population was poor in 2005, this applied to only 5 percent or less of the urban population [...] The vast majority of the poor in 2003 lived in rural areas, and poverty is most heavily concentrated in the northwestern and southwestern regions [...] Both rural and urban incomes have continued to grow, but the rural-urban gap has continued to widen [...]

Significant proportions of urban workers are covered by formal social insurance programs: in 2007, around half of workers had pension coverage, 45 percent had Basic Medical Insurance, and 40 percent had unemployment insurance and work injury insurance [...] The rural pension system (funded mainly by personal contributions and collective subsidies) covered only about 10-11% of the rural labor force (World Bank 2009: Table 6.65), and coverage of the farm-based elderly population appeared to be particularly limited. Beneficiaries were highly concentrated in a few (mostly wealthy) provinces. [...]

Since men who are not as educated, healthy, and able to earn well tend to fail to attract a bride, they are likely to be heavily represented among those who are unable to save adequately for their old age, or labor heavily into their old age. They are the most vulnerable to income and illness shocks, since they cannot smooth fluctuations in household income by pooling earnings from spouses or children. Unmarried individuals are also more likely to be living without family to serve as caregivers (Table 5). For example, in the 2000 census, 65% of those aged 65-80 who had ever-married were co-residing with younger kin, compared with only 20% of those never-married. Moreover, levels of co-residence have dropped sharply in recent decades (Table 5), and this trend can be expected to continue. The men who fail to marry are among the least likely to be able to save for their old age, to work in their old age, and to have access to old age support from family members.”

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Last, a few tables (click to view full size):

Wu Bao, Di Bao and Tekun Hu are various social assistance programs: “The Te Kun program provides cash assistance to very poor and incapacitated residents of less-developed areas, at the discretion of the local officials. The Wu Bao program, dating from the 1950s, sought to ensure that no section of the population remained destitute.11 In 2006, the State Council issued regulations that shift financing responsibility for wubao from village reserves to local fiscal budgets (World Bank 2008:79-80). The Di Bao program, also known as the Minimum Living Standard Scheme, provides subsidies and in-kind transfers to those living below a certain poverty line.”

More than 45 % of the total income of Chinese urban residents above the age of 60 comes from pensions; the number for rural residents in the same age group is about one-tenth of that, 4.6 %. Also take note of the family support numbers.

Random wikipedia links of interest

1. Corrosion.

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2. Demographics of the People’s Republic of China. A few quotes from the article:

a) “Census data obtained in 2000 revealed that 119 boys were born for every 100 girls, and among China’s “floating population” the ratio was as high as 128:100. These situations led the government in July 2004 to ban selective abortions of female fetuses. It is estimated that this imbalance will rise until 2025–2030 to reach 20% then slowly decrease.[2]“

b) “Average household size (2005) 3.1; rural households 3.3; urban households 3.0.
Average annual per capita disposable income of household (2005): rural households Y 3,255 (U.S.$397), urban households Y 10,493 (U.S.$1,281).”

c) A map of the population density (darker squares have higher density):

The ‘average population density’ of 137/km2 is not an all that interesting variable. The Gobi desert is not a nice place for humans to live: The temperature variation in the area is extreme, ranging from –40°C in the winter to +50°C in the summer.

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3. Cost overrun. An excerpt:

“Cost overrun is common in infrastructure, building, and technology projects. One of the most comprehensive studies [1] of cost overrun that exists found that 9 out of 10 projects had overrun, overruns of 50 to 100 percent were common, overrun was found in each of 20 nations and five continents covered by the study, and overrun had been constant for the 70 years for which data were available. For IT projects, an industry study by the Standish Group (2004) found that average cost overrun was 43 percent, 71 percent of projects were over budget, over time, and under scope, and total waste was estimated at US$55 billion per year in the US alone.”

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4. Tensor. This is difficult stuff.

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5. Eye.

Another book I might add to my wish-list

The great wall of confinement: The Chinese Prison Camp through Contemporary Fiction and Reportage

The amazon-reviewer is a bit rough, calling the book: A rehash of what is already well know. Lacking in good new information and specifics. Good for the novice – but then again, I am a novice, so it might be worth a look. A large part of the book seems btw. to be available for free here, I guess I shall have to read some of these excerpts before I decide whether or not to put it on the list.

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The Olympics in Beijing approach rapidly. We shouldn’t forget that Zhang Honghai, Yang Zili, Jin Haike and Xu Wei are all still in jail.

Newyouth4.org

Some people have apparently taken the freekareem-initiators advice, and have started their own campaign.

Next year, when thousands of foreigners will be gathering in Beijing to participate in the Olympics, Yang Zili, Zhang Honghai, Jin Haike and Xu Wei will in all likelihood still be in jail. Something to think about…