Foreign Capitalism and China’s Traditional Economy

Abstract

This article aims to put forward ideas different from the current views on the relationship between foreign capitalism and the development of China into a capitalist society and on the attitudes of imperialism towards the system of feudal exploitation in China, in an attempt to encourage discussion and further to deepen research.

Professor Liu Foding is head of the economic history group in the Institute of Economics at Nankai University. He has written widely on Chinese and foreign capitalism in China and has led the work of editing and publishing the archives of the Kailuan Mining Administration. This article makes use of that material as well as of the Institute’s work on the salt industry.

This article remains firmly within the Marxist tradition and quotes extensively from Marxist classics. At the same time it represents one of the most careful as well as one of the most imaginative overviews of the problem of the influence of imperialism on the Chinese economy, analysing, for example, the counterfactual implications of many positions taken on the issue. Many of the arguments it criticises will be familiar to those who have read the dependency theorists.¹