Abstract
The rise of industrial capitalism in the West marked the epoch when ‘a world of static expansion give way to one of intensive growth’.3 Early modem history allowed repeated, tentative efforts of intensive growth to bubble up through the stately rising dough of extensive growth. Why was it that industrial capitalism could eventually take hold in the West while imperial China remained a ‘feudal’ society? This question, formulated within the unilinear conception of world history, was one of the central concerns of the Chinese cultural discourse for modernity in the late twentieth century.
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Notes
This notion was first raised by Ri Zhi in an article ‘A discussion with Tong Shuye over the Asiatic Mode of Production’ (Ri Zhi, 1952). Ri Zhi and other scholars such as Wang Yanan, Wu Ze and Wu Dakun, thought that Marx had been referring to ‘the primitive or primary stage of Ancient slavery in the East’, which either followed or proceeded from European slavery. (See also Historical Studies, 1983, p. 6).
Lawrence Krader’s The Asiatic Mode of Production: Source, Development and Critique in the Writings ofKarl Marx (1975) was translated into Chinese. This and other books containing Marx’s many previous unknown notes on the Asiatic Mode of Production encouraged some Chinese historians to believe that Marx used this concept to distinguish the different road of social evolution. See Wu Dakun, 1980, and Zhi Sun and Xue Sheng, 1979.
Melotti’s Marx and the Third World was translated into Chinese and published by the Commercial Press in 1980.
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© 2002 He Ping
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Ping, H. (2002). China’s Historical Stagnation: Social and Economic Aspects. In: China’s Search for Modernity. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288560_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230288560_2
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