Labor Intensive Industrialization in the Yangzi Delta: Late Imperial Patterns and their Modern Fates

Incomplete draft (with apologies): please do not quote or cite In their classic history of Chinese capitalism from 1550 to 1840,Wu Chengming and Xu Dixin (1985) took the labor-intensive nature of much Chinese industry as a sign of its backwardness. Xu and Wu particularly emphasized that the prevalence of rural industry in the Ming and Qing dynasties and the importance of laborers whose families also continued to farm indicated a failure to undergo true capitalist industrialization, which of necessity would involve proletarianization and urbanization of the work force and higher capital/labor ratios. In so arguing, Xu and Wu spoke both for a near consensus among historians in China at the time and for a perspective on the present which argued that whatever one thought of China’s experiments with small-scale rural industry under Mao, the country’s real industrial future lay in the gigantic steel mills and other factories of major cities. This view of both past and present was mirrored, oddly enough, by Western modernization theorists for whom the flourishing of labor-intensive rural industry was both a sign of the failure of true industrialization and something that, by taking advantage of exceptionally low wages, posed a continuing barrier to labor-saving technological change and “real “development