Economic Development in China Between the Two World Wars (1920–1936)

Abstract

What was China’s economic situation over the century between the Opium War and liberation in 1949? Was China’s economy developing, stagnating or declining? If it was developing, what was its growth rate? Was that rate fast or slow in comparison to other nations at the time? If we divide the period into sub-periods, in which period was growth fastest and development greatest for China? These are questions which concern all researchers on modern Chinese economic history and also all those generally interested in the economic history of China. Unfortunately the textbooks and monographs on modern Chinese economic history published in China do not contain answers to such questions. In this article the author cannot provide a comprehensive analysis of all the above problems but hopes to provide some initial clues through a statistical analysis of the period 1920–36, the most controversial period in modern Chinese economic history and the one where there is the greatest gap between the historical record and the traditional interpretations; we will also compare that period with the preceding (1887–1920) and following (1936–49) periods.

Wang Yuru is a young scholar from the Institute of Economics, Nankai University; her work reflects the interests of scholars at that Institute. Perhaps the two key points about this chapter are its attempt to develop macro-economic estimates for the whole of the Chinese economy and its complete rejection of the idea of stagnation in the 1920s and 1930s, arguing instead that this was the period of China’s most rapid economic development.¹