Junzhai Ma

Economy and Population of China in the Last Millennium Junzhai Ma

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject Economics - History, , language: English, abstract: This paper tries to investigate the development of population and economic development in china in the last millennium. There have been roughly three phases of development in China's history. The first phase starts at the beginning of the last millennium till 1820, we call this agrarian civilization. As agrarian economy, China had been performing better than Europe until the song dynasty in the eleventh century. After that China had been stagnating for about six centuries until 1820 in respect of economy, although its economy scale had been able to accommodate an ever increasing population. The time thereafter till 1949 for China was the darkest time in its history, combined with humiliation of foreign supremacy, civil war, and natural and human disasters. Until the founding of people's Republic of China, there was no national population control policy. From 1949 to 1976 the new republic of China has done its best first to industrialize the country, thus agriculture and light industry were neglected and living standards of the common people have not bettered substantially, as well as worsened by political upheavals. From 1978 till now with it opening to the western world, china's economy has been catching up quickly, although the gap to the developed countries is still very large.