Talk:Economic history of China before 1912

message: This page clearly is not a disambiguation page in it's current form, I applaud it's current form as not a disambiguation page even though it is without necessary sources.--Keerllston 04:14, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Not Disambiguation Page

message: see the title.Teeninvestor (talk) 21:53, 9 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Complete revamp coming

message: You have six citations so far, yet you have about 60 KB of prose text? Are you going to go through every single one of these sentences and place proper citations? It's good to add citations immediately after you write a sentence. Otherwise, over time, you may come back and completely forget the page number or even the source used for the statement. 
Also, I'd like to contribute to the Han section, but I have to level with you, Teeninvestor, this article will simply become unacceptable in terms of size. You are literally going to have to eliminate all the subsections, and just create small summaries of each period (by dynastic title and then modern age). You cannot have sections that are this large. Please read WP:SIZE. If you ever want this article to become a featured one, you are going to have to master the arts of summarization, condensing material, and cherry-picking info from sources that you find the most relevant, because you simply cannot include everything. I hope you can change course as soon as possible.--Pericles of AthensTalk 09:16, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Where are the citations?

message: Sorry I have been negligent in adding citations. My stocks were tanking and I was in distress for several days. My plan is to add citations after I finish the article.
Anyways, my plan is this. First, I want to pack as much info as I can in. Then, you and others can help me pick the relevant points. The excess info will be transferred to articles such as Economic history of pre-Qin China, Economic history of Absolutist China, Economic history of post-Tang China, etc... Then what is left will be retained as the main article. Anyways, I am still a bit distressed/I hope you can help me a bit, sorry for incoveniencing you.
As you can see I am writing overview sections for each dynasty and adding in details as I go.
Once the article is finished the overview sections will be part of the article and the details will go in a seperate article.
Teeninvestor (talk) 01:22, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: 沒問題; there's no need to apologize, Teeninvestor. Sorry to hear about your losses. I did not know about your plan to transfer info to later articles, such as Economy of Absolutist China, Post-Tang, etc, but I think it is a good idea. I will add info for the Han section, but it will come slowly, as I have work to do tonight and will be busy tomorrow until about 5:00 pm.--Pericles of AthensTalk 03:58, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  My plan for Economic history of China 

message: Teen, the article needs phrases inserted at the right places. For example, 井田, 佃農, 指南針, 活版印字術, 科舉, 大航海, 帝皇思想, 儒家, 法家, plus heaps of other words.
Like PoA mentioned, there is simply too much info to be crammed into one article, so you need to create other sub-article to carry these info. But the overall theme is good, I like the way you talk about things, though you need lots of citations to support. Arilang   talk 20:39, 4 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Chinese phrases needed

message: Teen, the comparison of GDP with others is also very important:
#Comparison of GDP between outsiders and Ming, Qing, ROC pre 1949, PRC pre Deng Xiaoping era. These comparison can show the true economic situation.
#I still think you need to cut down lots of politic reference, or try to be very brief. Like PoA mentioned, you just cannot put too much info into one article. Arilang   talk 06:02, 5 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Missing sections

message: Add pictures
Add citations
Expand Ming, Qing, ROC, PRC sections.Teeninvestor (talk) 13:49, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I just left a short gallery of pics on your talk page for you to start with. Put them where you like. I'll snoop around Wikimedia Commons for more pictures later.--Pericles of AthensTalk 19:57, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I just added a new source recently by Donald and Benewick (2005), adding a couple citations from it. I also added a lot of new pictures (as you've probably noticed).--Pericles of AthensTalk 19:58, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: To do list

message: Maintain at 140kb-ish? Since the Ming Dynasty article is about 140kb(and this article has a much more broad scope) I think the article should be maintained at a size of about 140kb(it's also getting harder to cut stuff out). What do you think? The PRC section will be expanded in the future, so it s advisable to cut back to about 130-140kb. The final size will be around 140kb.Teeninvestor (talk) 19:18, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: WP:SIZE does not state anything about guidelines for the overall size of the article. However, it does state that an article's prose size should not exceed 100 KB. The Ming Dynasty is nowhere near 141 KB prose size; the Ming Dynasty's prose size is at 83 KB, while it's overall article size is at 137 KB. This article's prose size is roughly 140 KB. See the gigantic difference? I hate to say this (since you've put so much work into this article), but you still have roughly 40 KB of text to cleave from this article before it scratches the bare minimum of acceptable size limits for any article at Wiki. In fact, WP:SIZE says that for any article with over 60 KB of prose, a split into several articles should be considered. Your best option is to split this article into several articles, and summarize them here at this article.--Pericles of AthensTalk 19:51, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

text: Prose is the main body of text; this excludes the lead or introduction, all pictures and picture captions, all reference headings, all citations, all references, all see also links and external links, templates, tables, encoded markups, and invisible categories.--Pericles of AthensTalk 19:55, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, you did a fine job cutting the article down to size thus far. As for your split into two articles, that sounds fine. Make sure to collaborate this effort with Economy of Taiwan and Economy of the People's Republic of China. Make sure to summarize the info that you cut out of this article.--Pericles of AthensTalk 20:01, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Considering the vast scope of the article

message: http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/8639651.html
当提及为什么魏可以统一天下的时候,有一个原因是不能忽略的,那就是曹操的经济改革,而其中很重要的一项就是屯田制的实行.这不仅使魏的粮食得到了积累, 社会生产力也大步的发展了,使魏的经济走在其他各国的前头.正是这种物质和经济的双重保障,为后来魏一统天下做出了不可磨灭的贡献. 
Teen, 屯田 is a very important 制度, looks like it is missing. Arilang   talk 22:49, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: 屯田

message: No article is perfect. I only put the work on this article after about two months of working on it in userspace. Right now I'm still working on it. Don't revert it just because it's not perfect yet. Geez.Teeninvestor (talk) 11:37, 19 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Reversion

message: I changed back the article's name because it is unencyclopedic to have "Economic history of China" to serve as a redirect to "Economic history of Premodern China", not to mention such title simply sounds awkward and we shouldn't borrow names directly from another source either (http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/deng.china).  This article should cover economic periods from the Republic to the People's Republic, but the length needs to be trimmed because there are separate articles for them already.--Balthazarduju (talk) 20:40, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, as long as you clean things up a bit and make sure the sources listed in the ref sections are placed in the right articles, then I think your current model will be fine.--Pericles of AthensTalk 21:39, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

text: Well I think that this whole article(s) is a big mess.  So now we have Economic history of China redirecting to Economic history of China (Pre-1911), and so if you want to read about economic history of China after 1911, there is a link somewhere else.  How convenient.  This article could've easily be summarized as to include the "entire" economic history of China without getting this long.  Just trim the sections! There are already very detailed articles about Economy of Han Dynasty, Song Dynasty and Ming Dynasty, so these periods doesn't even need a lot of coverage!  There are so many large, rambling, almost incoherent paragraphs on this article, it makes the article almost unreadable.--Balthazarduju (talk) 21:58, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

text: I suggest make this article just a summary of economic history of China (and rename it back to Economic history of China), and that includes brief summary of economy of Republic of China and People's Republic of China.  You can add your new, extensive information about modern economy to articles: Economy of the People's Republic of China, Economic history of the People's Republic of China, Economic History of the Republic of China.  These are the articles you need to add your information to, not create another article titled Economic history of Modern China, which, would results in so many links about the economy/economic history of China that it is getting kind of ridiculous.--Balthazarduju (talk) 21:58, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Rename

message: Teen, I think you've created a bigger mess than is necessary. You have to be very careful when you shift a lot of material to a new article and do redirects. For example, the new source I added today is still listed in the references of this article, even though it is not used here, but it is now lost (or you simply forgot to add it) in your new article, Economic history of Modern China, even though it is used there! The source is:
*Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk and Robert Benewick. (2005). The State of China Atlas: Mapping the World's Fastest Growing Economy. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. . 
I think it would be better to have one large Economic history of China article that summarizes both Premodern China and Modern China, which could both have separate articles. In fact, that's what I thought your plan was all along.--Pericles of AthensTalk 21:23, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Please be VERY careful

message: K. Here's the current system.   
   
Original article has been split into Economic history of China(pre-1911) and Economic history of Modern China. Economic history will redirect to the first article, but a notice at the top will show that for modern developments you go to Economic history of Modern China.   
The reason I did this is that I will be getting several new sources that I will be expanding the ROC and PRC sections with. If such an expansion occurs, the article will become simply too large to handle. Therefore I decided to split it into 2 articles, 1 ancient and 1 modern.
Another way we can do this is to keep the ROC and PRC information in the article, and then I'll expand it there. But if that happens, the article will expand to 140kb-ish, and although right now It's probably only a bit bigger than the Ming in Prose size(before split), an expansion with the sources will bring it higher.
A third way is to leave the two articles as they currently are, and create a new Economic history of China article that summarizes both premodern and modern and redirects to them.
Teeninvestor (talk) 21:29, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, as long as you clean things up a bit and make sure the sources listed in the ref sections are placed in the right articles, then I think your current model will be fine.--Pericles of AthensTalk 21:39, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Getting confused here

message: I followed the instructions on WP:SIZE and it showed that this article's prose size did not exceed 91 kilobytes, as shown by this link Teeninvestor (talk) 21:53, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Well I think that this whole article(s) is a big mess.  So now we have Economic history of China redirecting to Economic history of China (Pre-1911), and so if you want to read about economic history of China after 1911, there is a link somewhere else.  How convenient.  This article could've easily be summarized as to include the "entire" economic history of China without getting this long.  Just trim the sections! There are already very detailed articles about Economy of Han Dynasty, Song Dynasty and Ming Dynasty, so these periods doesn't even need a lot of coverage!  There are so many large, rambling, almost incoherent paragraphs on this article, it makes the article almost unreadable.--Balthazarduju (talk) 21:58, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

text: I suggest make this article just a summary of economic history of China (and rename it back to Economic history of China), and that includes brief summary of economy of Republic of China and People's Republic of China.  You can add your new, extensive information about modern economy to articles: Economy of the People's Republic of China, Economic history of the People's Republic of China, Economic History of the Republic of China.  These are the articles you need to add your information to, not create another article titled Economic history of Modern China, which, would results in so many links about the economy/economic history of China that it is getting kind of ridiculous.--Balthazarduju (talk) 21:58, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Size issues solved

message: I thought there was no direct archaeological evidence to suggest that the house of Xia even existed, and that what may be regarded as the Xia was only the Erlitou culture, which nonetheless did have bronze production and built palatial-like buildings. After all, China's first written script, the oracle bone script, didn't even exist until the middle of the Shang Dynasty. How is it confirmed that the Xia Dynasty was a real political entity without a contemporary written record to prove so?--Pericles of AthensTalk 22:05, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Sure, every Chinese history book after the Shiji, but one has to remember that Sima Qian was writing the history of the Xia more than a thousand years after it allegedly existed. There's no written record before that of Sima Qian's which describes the Xia at such length; one has to consider the historical authenticity of the entire dynasty. However, the Shang is in a safe ballpark; the Shang actually left written records behind on bone which hold the names of their kings (so we do know that they lived and existed). If the Xia existed at all, they certainly would have been unable to do likewise, since writing was not yet invented.--Pericles of AthensTalk 22:11, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Xia Dynasty?

message: Why quote The Economist with it´s poorly based information?
Look at this and you'll see their statement is not based on facts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.226.72.14 (talk) 22:07, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Why quote The Economist,  

message: I'm going to remove the quotes to Financial Times and the Economist because they have no base for their facts and the information has no place in this article. It's no true statistical fact and the wiki needs to be credible.
The world bank writes:"For a large part of the last two millennia, China was the world's largest and most advanced economy. Then it missed the Industrial Revolution and stagnated. Only after opening to the outside world in 1979 was China's economic performance again impressive."
Thats a different thing, for a large part of the last two millennia.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Tosses (talk • contribs) 
:You need a cite for that. Your assertions against two major newsmagazines is not convincing. Shadowjams (talk) 08:42, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Who were "they"? For large periods of its history, China was no unified country and when it was it was often ruled by foreign dynasties and powers. But anyway, people should be aware that, as one economic historian had it, there are no quarterly adjusted economic numbers for the last two millennia. To act as if these numbers were facts is deeply unprofessional, and either naive or biased. Maddison says that figures before 1750 are guess work and the margin of error in calculating values such as GDP etc. in the late 19th was still 30%. So, in the light of this, what makes people here so cocksure that China was the leading economy for the last 2000 years? Do you have access to indicators which no-one else has? Gun Powder Ma (talk) 20:32, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: You see, Gun Powder Ma, we have something called a "source" which tells us that China was the biggest economy for "much of the past two millenia", which we then use for our statements. If you do not understand this, then there goes the whole point of wikipedia. If you don't like our figures, you can get a "source" of your own.Teeninvestor (talk) 20:41, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Remove Financial Times 

message: Why 1911?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.78.64.101 (talk) 02:25, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Very simple: this year marks not only the end of the Qing Dynasty, but also roughly two thousand years of Imperial rule by emperors with the creation of the modern Republic of China (and later the People's Republic). It is rational and totally acceptable to divide economy articles on these political grounds, because it marks the beginning of a new era in Chinese history. The profound changes in Chinese society brought by this new political order cannot be overstated.--Pericles of AthensTalk 02:54, 1 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Arbitrary date

message: :It seems that Donald Wagner is arguing against Hartwell's method, not suggesting an alternative figure; see his statement here. Also, it seems I am correct; the figure is 114,000 metric tons, but the commonly cited figure is 125,000 english tons; they are both correct though. To quote Wagner:
Robert Hartwell’s research in the early 1960’s into the iron industry of Song China
(960–1279) showed, using a variety of evidence, that the applications of iron expanded
greatly in the early Song. He then calculated from tax data the annual iron production of
China in the 11th century. This article argues that, while Hartwell’s qualitative
conclusions hold, his specific calculation of annual production is flawed: no reliable
calculation is possible based on presently available sources.
I have read his paper. His argument has two ponts. First, he notes that no Song iron production figures are reliable because of irregular delieveries of iron to the state, so the tax receipts may not reflect reality (as a huge amount of iron production was untaxed and illegal); in additon, this does not account for Wang Anshi's tax increases. Second, he contests the tax rate used by Hartwell of one-tenth; however, on this point it is very confusing. Overall, it seems that Hartwell's figure is still the only one available (and indeed Wagner claims it is "quite plausible"). Interestingly enough, Wagner supports the thesis that Han iron technology was more advanced than Rome: 
In his conclusion, Wagner offers an interesting reflection. The iron-production technology of the Roman world resulted in small-scale, localized industry, which was of no political or financial interest to the state. In China, a more advanced technology, which gave significant economies of scale, encouraged a powerful state to take a direct interest in iron production and thereby further increase its economic and political power
Considering how rapacious the Roman state was in its search for revenues, this seems to indicate that the iron industry was very unimportant. This would cast doubt on your Roman figure of 86,000 tons, as Wagner specifically stated Chinese iron technology as superior, yet he puts  Legal iron production of the Han state monopoly at just 5,000 tons (the true production must be higher, considering private illegal iron production and resistance to the monopoly). As the Romans had only access to bloomery smelting and no large-scale iron works, it is difficult to see how their production was higher than the Han, let alone the Song. Use of iron artifacts, especially iron agricultural tools, were especially prevalent during the Han, while Romans used wooden ploughs. And even Wagner's estimate may be incorrect; if we assume that Later Han iron production was equal to the Tang (a very plausible assumption given the Wu Hu invasions, the state of technology and the Tang's interventions), we would have a figure of 21,000 tons for Han iron production, a figure of 0.4 tons per capita (a plausible figure when taking into account illegal production). Teeninvestor (talk) 15:54, 26 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Examination of Wagner's source

message: "According to some scholars, China was for a large part of the last two millennia the world's largest[1] and among the wealthiest and most advanced economies."
There are a ton of things wrong with this sentence. The phrase "China was for a large part of the last two millennia the world's largest" does not make sense. Largest what? Also, the phrase "According to some scholars" is vague (not to mention cliche) in Wikipedia. According to the scholars who study China? According to most scholars? According to an arbitrary majority of scholars? There is no basis for quantifying the "according to..." argument unless a comprehensive list of academic dissent is referred (at least), in other words, people who disagree with the statement that China was the world's largest economy for a "large part" of the last two millennia. Or was it "most" of the last two millennia? Furthermore, "wealthiest" is vague, and although it clearly implies a per capita basis, it is easily confused with overall size (national wealth, GDP) in the beginning - in which case it would be clearly redundant. 
I will propose that the sentence be the following:
"China was the largest economy in the world for much of the past two millennia [1], as well as one of the wealthiest per capita and most technologically advanced."
"A large part" has been replaced by "much" because the former is bad style, while the latter gives room for interpretation and has concise readability. I have deleted the "according to some scholars" muck for a very good reason. There is always dissent no matter what. Even on something as clear as "HIV causes AIDS" you will find some degree of political and even scientific dissent! My science forum has an engineer who disagrees with special relativity! China's economy was not necessarily greater than the Romans (that remains TBD), but certainly outlasted it by far. One concrete reference is enough to state the sentence without mentioning accordance.
Facial (talk) 17:56, 2 September 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: NOTE  is a blocked sockpuppet. 70.24.244.20 (talk) 06:40, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

text: India couldn't be the largest economy in this period, since it wasn't a single economy, unless we're using aggregate geographic regions instead of political states. "India" as such would then include all of South Asia. Usually when speaking about China, it's about the dominant Chinese state of the period...  As for wealth being average, this can't be correct. The world contains more poor economies than rich ones, and poor ones cannot afford the civil engineering works China carried out, or the military hardware used to equip its armies, so it has to be above average in wealth. "China had one of the largest economies historically" is fine by me though. 70.24.244.20 (talk) 15:00, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: It's no doubt that China was historically an important economic entity as a whole, for China held so large a population. However, it seems controversial whether the Chinese were ever among the wealthiest per capita. Maybe we shall leave this question if no direct and conclusive evidence is found.--Certiffon (talk) 14:23, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Contentious Sentence, Consider Revising 

message: Can this article be more of a biased joke? Seriously. It's pages like this that make it perfectly understandable why college professors refuse to allow wikipedia as a legitimate source for their student's papers.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.104.150.78 (talk) 07:03, 15 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Wow

message: This edit established the use of the page as / but, as a reminder, we don't actually list  after every date, just the ones where confusion might arise. Similarly, it's omitted from centuries. — LlywelynII 13:28, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: [[WP:ERA]]

message: As a reminder, if the section on feudal China says it's "dubious" China was ever feudal, the next three sections shouldn't repeatedly discuss the decline and fall of feudal China.
If the section on the well field system says "historians don't believe it ever existed", the next two sections shouldn't discuss its disappearance or replacement. — LlywelynII 13:28, 8 July 2016 (UTC)
thread_title: Feudalism and Well-field system

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