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Unsurprisingly, writings on the economic history of nineteenth and twentieth century China have been confusing and full of controversy. A major question is whether the Chinese economy experienced per capita output growth, stagnated, or declined between 1870 and World War II. Studies prior to 1937 usually claimed that the rural economy's output per capita declined, with only modest expansion of a small, modern sector restricted to railroads and manufacturing firms, and that this modern sector declined during the great world depression of the 1930s (Myers 1970:13–18; Ozaki 1939; Tawney 1932). A few studies of the 1960s and 1970s generally confirmed this view (Eastman 1974:chap. 5; Paauw 1952:3–26). Various theories attempted to explain this continuing or deepening poverty in China, including some, such as Ch'en Han-seng's, that emphasized exploitation or the misdistribution of wealth (Myers 1970).

1. Posing the problem 2. Taiwan under Japanese rule 3. The establishment of nationalist rule 4. The uprising 5. The nationalist's response 6. The nature and aftermath of the tragedy Appendixes Notes Bibliography Index.

This diary offers an important new perspective on the critical events leading to the end of the Chinese civil war. From September 1945 to April 1946, Chang Kia-ngau kept a daily log in the negotiations between Nationalist China and Soviet Union to recover Manchuria from Soviet military occupation. The diary reveals that the Russians actively sought Nationalist China's cooperation in rehabilitating and operating the huge industrial complex that the Japanese had built in Manchuria during the 1930s and 1940s. The Russians were willing to let Chiang Kai-shek's government take control over Manchuria if the Nationalists would pledge that only Russia would be able to exert foreign influence in Manchuria. Chang Kia-ngau's diary is an eyewitness account of how Manchuria, one of the world's greatest industrial sites, fell to the control of the Chinese Red Army and thus led to the communist victory over Chiang Kai-shek. This book will interest students of cold war rivalry, U.S. foreign policy, Soviet diplomacy, and Chinese history alike.

More recently, a new approach has been developed by G. W. Skinner to explain the deployment of resources and social action in terms of special spatial patterns. Skinner has greatly influenced China scholars to reconsider spatial organization and its implications for the evolution of society. He believed that spatial aggregation (or "space") is a key aspect in explaining historical behavior. Therefore, he advanced three spatial concepts for the study of China; macroregions, cores, and peripheries. This essay argues that although Skinner's concepts are intuitively appealing, some are too vague to be tested, while others are not supported by the economic and demographic facts they claim to represent. More specifically, of Skinner's three concepts the macroregion proved the most difficult to test. Where we could test it, the concept did not accurately identify China's economic resource patterns. Further, while the core and periphery concepts proved extremely amenable to testing, their results did not correctly represent the location of China's resources. We should note that

Studies of Asian agriculture have argued that land-tenure systems have often retarded agricultural development, in that unequal land distribution and widespread tenancy have given peasants little power to resist landlord efforts to squeeze and rack-rent them. Because landlords have been disinclined to devote their wealth and energies to improving the land, agriculture has stagnated and peasants have became poorer. A conspicuous weakness in this argument is that it begs the question whether a land-tenure system of more or less equal holdings best promotes agricultural development. The land-tenure system influences income distribution in agriculture, but it is impossible to say how a given income distribution influences landlord consumption, saving, and investment decisions unless more is known about the social and political institutions of a given rural society.

Japan's acquisition and development of Taiwan did not stem from the efforts of a capitalist class seeking cheaper resources and new market outlets, or engaging in dumping practices to maintain a high rate of domestic profit. Taiwan's economic transformation was brought about by enterprising bureaucrats who formulated a policy of state action in areas unattractive to private capital in order to create conditions that would encourage and sustain private investment. Taiwan's traditional economy was not destroyed completely, but restructured in such a way that land and labor became more productive and resources previously idle were now employed. Japanese colonial policy was successful for the following reasons.(1) The administration of Kodama and Gotō consisted of able leaders assisted by expert young subordinates who were dedicated to their jobs. Kodama was a first class administrator and apparently had a genius for organizing and extracting the best from his officials. Throughout his governorship he gave Gotō full support, especially in the early years when many military officers and foreign advisers complained to Kodama about Gotō's administrative methods. Aldiough Kodama's career ended in 1906, he stands out as one of the most able and imaginative young officials of the late Meiji period. In Gotō, Kodama had an enterprising, intelligent, and dedicated assistant capable of surrounding himself with able, loyal officials and providing the coordination and leadership necessary to organize their work efficiently. Gotō also had the initiative and ability to make the right strategy move or policy decision when the occasion demanded. He possessed a unique talent for discerning which elements in the traditional society could be used to strengthen modern institutions. His policy of integrating the pao-chia with a modern police system was the political key to the Japanese success in enforcing their control in the colony and obtaining local acceptance of it at the same time.(2) The Kodama-Gotō administration simultaneously introduced a number of important reforms and investment to establish an extensive infra-structure. This encouraged expansion of the market and enabled the administration to formulate policies of promotion, regulation, and financial support to build an industry of great comparative advantage to the island, sugar.(3) Kodama and Gotō relied on fiscal reform and deficit financing to finance their programs of reform and economic development. Taiwan's fiscal resources were limited, but the administration managed to secure the home government's underwriting of a large debt issue. The land tax reform, the introduction of new excise taxes, and the creation of the monopoly bureaus resulted in large tax revenues which enabled the administration to repay its debt within the stipulated repayment period and accumulate large budget surpluses at the same time. Taiwan's early economic growth was financed on a pay-as-you-go basis.On first appearance, the events in Taiwan seemed to duplicate the Meiji modernization achievement. But one important distinction must be kept in mind. The Meiji bureaucracy, unlike the small group of active bureaucrats in Taiwan's administration, applied their policies of reform and state support to sectors other than agriculture. Kodama insisted that Taiwan's agriculture, particularly the export of food and raw materials to Japan, be developed to augment Japan's power for economic warfare. Had Kodama and Gotō remained in Taiwan, they might have introduced different economic and social programs in response to changing demands from Japan's industrialization and Taiwan's population increase. Subsequent colonial administrators only imitated Kodama's economic program, and while it is easy to explain this behavior by reference to the usual pattern of modern colonial rule, this seems overly facile in the light of Japan's early and heavy investment in her colony. An explanation of this puzzle is possible only after further study of Taiwan's economic growth and her economic and political relationships with Japan.

The failure of Chinese agriculture to undergo a transformation whereby production could increase rapidly and institutional change could occur has been long regarded by many scholars to be one of the principal reasons China did not achieve modernization after the 1880's but instead became engulfed in revolution and war during the first half of the twentieth century. During the 1930's, various schools of thought explained this absence of agrarian transformation on the grounds that either institutional and social class relationships led to exploitation of the peasantry or that the lack of leadership and organizations failed to provide the peasantry with new farming technology and the resources needed to increase production.