قد و توسعه اقتصادی در جنوب چین، 1810-1880

Foreign influence on South China increasingly disrupted the economy from the late eighteenth century. Many scholars believe the standard of living fell, while others point to positive gains from increased integration with the world economy. The paper estimates the secular trend in the average height of the southern Chinese in the nineteenth century based on data from prison registers in colonial Australia. Contrary to the pessimist view, height began to decline obviously only from the 1850s, a product of the dislocation effects of revolts and rebellions. At 163–164 cm, the Chinese were of similar stature to the military conscripts of some European countries in the early-to-mid nineteenth century.

Before the “great divergence” in the economic trajectory of Europe and East Asia at the end of the eighteenth century, parts of China might have had a level of economic wellbeing similar to advanced regions in Europe (Pomeranz, 2000). Smithian growth in Europe combined with the huge social and economic upheaval in China during the nineteenth century saw China increasingly lag behind the advanced capitalist economies. The effect was to reduce severely per capita income from which China was not to recover until the 1950s, according to Maddison, 1998, Maddison, 2001 and Maddison, 2003. However, conventional economic data to construct times series for estimating the past standard of living in China are far inferior to other large countries. Height data have often filled such data gaps for other pre-twentieth century economies, serving as an indicator of the level and changes in the standard of living. Surprisingly few sources of height data have been discovered for China dating from before the twentieth century compared with Europe and North America. Height data for nineteenth century-born Chinese that have been reported include Japanese colonial surveys in Taiwan (Olds, 2003), Chinese immigrants leaving the United States (Murray, 1994), the health examination records of the Chinese railways (Morgan, 2004), and Chinese imprisoned in the United States (Carson, 2006 and Carson, 2007).

Height data for Chinese born before the twentieth century is scarce. In this paper, we have described the earliest time series for the height of Chinese, pushing back in time estimates of the height of Chinese to the 1810s using prison records from the Colony of Victoria, Australia. The estimates show the average height for unskilled southern Chinese labourers was around 164 cm for the decades from the 1810s to the 1840s, after which the height decline to below 162 cm at the end of the century. Compared with past scholarship on the standard of living in China during the nineteenth century, these height estimates indicate that significant deterioration did not take place until after the mid-century decades.