Cambridge Journal of Economics 1978, 2, 55-81
Economic development in Meiji Japan and
contemporary China: a comparative study
Victor D. Lippit*
1. I n t r o d u c t i o n
Many distinctive features of early Chinese and Japanese development can be understood most readily in terms of the dominant class interest in their respective eras of
modernisation. The main aim of this essay is to show that the basic pattern of economic
development in Meiji Japan (1868-1912) was shaped by the interests of the propertyowning classes—mainly landowners and capitalists—while that of China since liberation (1949) has been shaped by the interests of the direct producers—mainly poor
peasants and workers. Reflecting the composition of its dominant classes, the Japanese
case is marked by the sacrifice of the welfare of the majority of the population, growing
inequality in the distribution of income and wealth, and a strongly elitist orientation,
with the Chinese case contrasting in each respect. Yet, in China, this orientation of
development gains towards the majority of the population was achieved simultaneously
with a highly respectable macroeconomic growth performance over the post-1949 period
as a whole—a performance which, incidentally, was far superior to that of Meiji Japan
(though, for methodological reasons, no simple comparison is legitimate here).
After a comparison in section 2 of the initial economic conditions in China and Japan,
section 3 provides an analysis of the relations between class structure and development
characteristics in each of the two countries. Section 4 compares their overall achievements with respect to national income growth and capital accumulation, followed in
section 5 by a brief summary of the entire argument. The relevant data on the two
countries' agricultural and industrial performances are presented in the Appendix.
2. Initial economic conditions
Differentials in income and other economic conditions between the less developed
and the advanced countries are generally so great that it is easy to miss the significance
of differentials among the less developed countries themselves. The problem is compounded by the inevitable imprecision of international income comparisons and is
exacerbated when such comparisons must be made between countries which initiated
their development at different times. One such comparison, for example, puts China's
per capita gross domestic product (GDP) at 58 US 1957 dollars in 1952 and Japan's
* Department of Economics, University of California, Riverside. I would like to thank Helen Chauncey,
Junichi Hoshikawa, Ramon Myers, and especially the editors of the Cambridgi Journal of Economics for
their comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.
03O9-166X/78/0301-O055 $05.00/0
© 1978 Academic Press Inc. (London) Limited
56
V. D. Lippit
at 63 US 1960 dollars in 1886 (Perkins, 1975A, p. 134). Although these figures require
careful qualification, they would seem to suggest that China and Japan entered their
eras of modernisation with about the same level of real per capita income. However,
they do not bring out the fact that, according to a wide range of indices, economic
conditions were substantially more favourable in Japan than in China.
Possibly the most important difference between early Meiji Japan and China immediately after liberation concerns the size of the surplus (i.e. the share of national income
above culturally defined subsistence levels), which was substantially greater in Japan.
In the case of China, conservative quantitative estimates suggest that, excluding the
output forgone because of the unemployment and under-utilisation of labour and
other resources, the surplus as a percentage of net domestic product (NDP) was 19-0%
in the agricultural sector (Lippit, 1974, p. 79) and 8-2% in the non-agricultural sector
(Riskin, 1975, p. 74), amounting together to some 27-2% of NDP in 1933. It can
reasonably be assumed that conditions in 1949 were not substantially different. While
the existence of this surplus shows that the thesis that China was caught in a 'highlevel equilibrium trap' (Elvin, 1973, ch. 17), unable to generate sufficient resources
in the domestic economy to bring about economic development, requires critical reevaluation, the thesis rightly points out that the surplus in China was quite small
compared to other countries.f Since savings and investment must be generated out
of this surplus, a small surplus places an important constraint on the task of raising
the savings—investment ratio in the early development process.
We do not have such quantitative estimates of the share of surplus in NDP for late
Tokugawa or early modern Japan, but we do have considerable evidence indicating
that the share was probably much larger than in China. During the period of Tokugawa
rule (1600-1868) Japan's population increased by about 10%, reaching about 30
million by 1853 (Hirschmeier, 1964, p. 72). From 1721 to 1846 there was no population
growth (Umemura, 1969, p. 178). The failure of the population to grow during Tokugawa times, when infanticide was a common practice, was a sign of the unequal
distribution of income rather than of the absence of a surplus. For, during this period,
the area under cultivation increased substantially and agricultural output appears to
have about doubled. J This juxtaposition of a 10% population growth and a 100%
output growth over the Tokugawa period as a whole suggests a large and growing
surplus. Other available evidence provides further support for this.
The size of the surplus in the Tokugawa period is reflected more directly in the
share of the crop paid as rent, which is usually a good measure of the difference between
subsistence requirements and output, that is of the surplus, in 'traditional' societies.
During the Tokugawa period the land tax paid to the lord was essentially the same as
a rent; 'It was held that the proper way to govern was to see that the farmers "had just
enough to keep alive on and no more"—to cite a dictum ascribed to [Tokugawa]
Ieyasu by a political writer of his day' (Sansom, 1962, p. 465). The customary distribution of the crop was supposed to be 'sfu-ko, rohi-mxri or 'four to the prince and six to
•f The high-level equilibrium trap thesis improperly assumes there can be a 'using up' of the best innovations and that there is a sharp discontinuity between modern and traditional agricultural technology.
Moreover, it implies the disappearance or iharp reduction of the agricultural surplus, while the empirical
evidence available shows no marked change in the surplus. A full critique of the thesis appears in my
essay, T h e development of underdevdopment in China', scheduled to appear in Modem China around
the Summer 1978 issue.
} See the discussion in Hirschmeier (1964). Official data show a larger increase, but Hirschmeier presents
a reasonable case for adopting the more conservative estimate.
Meiji Japan and contemporary China
57
the people', but in fact it was 'sometimes even two to the prince and one to the people'
(ibid.). On average, the Tokugawa land tax-rent took 50-60 % of gross output according to figures cited by Thomas Smith (1955, p. 78), but the data by Gustav Ranis
cited in Table 6 below for the first years of the Meiji period suggest that the ratio in
the late Tokugawa years may have been closer to 70%. These figures do not reflect
the full burden on the peasantry, which was also obliged to provide unpaid labour
services for the maintenance of roads and embankments and for other purposes. In
contrast, rent took an average of only 40 % of the gross output on tenanted land in
pre-liberation China (49 % of net output including unpaid labour services and so forth;
these and the following data are from Lippit, 1974; ch. 2). Moreover, only 33-5%
of the land area was farmed by tenants in China, so only about 13-4% of the gross
output of agriculture took the form of land rent. Since the taxes paid by owner-farmers
amounted to an additional 3-2% of gross agricultural output, 16-6% of gross agricultural output took the form of rent and taxes in China, suggesting a surplus far smaller
than the levels prevailing in late Tokugawa Japan.
The surplus in Tokugawa Japan had to sustain, moreover, an institutional superstructure much more elaborate in relation to the size of the population than it did in
China. The class of samurai and nobles constituted about 5 % of the Japanese population
in 1886 (Taeuber, 1958, p. 28); in Tokugawa times this class had been the direct
beneficiary of the agricultural taxes that the peasants paid. The sankin kotai hostage
system, which required the daimyo or lord of each of the 250-300 han to live in Edo
(Tokyo) in alternate years, leaving his family behind as hostages to assure good behaviour when he returned to his han, led to enormous expenses for luxurious maintenance
and travel. Some competition in conspicuous consumption naturally developed among
the daimyo, but possibly more important, the shogun required the daimyo to maintain
a high level of consumption expenditures to prevent them from becoming financially
strong enough to present a threat to his regime. 'A han usually spent well over half
its tax income to maintain its Edo personnel and establishments, and another 5 to 10%
might go into the costs of the journey to and from the shogunal capital' (Reischauer
& Fairbank, 1958, p. 608). If we assume conservatively that one half of peasant production was paid to the daimyo in taxes, we arrive at the staggering result that one
quarter of the annual agricultural product, itself well over half of national income,
went to support the sankin kotai system.
This portion of the surplus also went, via the expenditures of the samurai and nobility,
to support the rise of the urban artisans and large-scale merchants. But in addition
to this, the rising rural merchant-industrial entrepreneurs skimmed off a growing
portion of the surplus directly. In China there was of course nothing comparable to
the sankin kotai system, and while there was indeed a rural rich peasant class engaged
in commerce, money-lending and so forth, all indications are that its activities were
much less developed than those of its Japanese counterpart.
Further evidence of the greater size of the surplus in premodern Japan is provided
by the share of agricultural output marketed in China and Japan. This share is not
the same as the surplus per se, but other things being equal a larger marketed share
suggests the likelihood of a larger surplus. Whereas the marketed share in China during
the early 20th century was about 30-40% (Perkins, 1975C, p. 4), in Japan in the 1860s
the like figure was 58-69% (Crawcour, 1965, pp. 39-41).
Another indicator of the higher income levels prevailing in Japan on the eve of
modernisation is the low income elasticity of demand for food during the Meiji era
58
V. D. Lippit
relative to that in China in the 1950s; in general there is an inverse correlation between
living standards and the income elasticity of demand for food. According to a rough
calculation by Hiromitsu Kaneda (1969, p. 405), the income elasticity of demand for
starchy staple foods in Japan between 1878 and 1922 was about 0-14. In China in
the 1950s, the evidence points to a much higher income elasticity of demand for food
in the agricultural sector, which included about 80 % of the population. The peasants
benefited from the land reform, from improving terms of trade during the First Five
Year Plan period, from rising real output and from a falling tax burden, but total
government collections of grain remained about the same between 1952 and 1957
(Eckstein, 1966, p. 30). The evidence suggests that much of the rising real income the
peasants experienced during this period took the form of increased grain consumption,
that is, that there was a relatively high income elasticity of demand for grain.
The evidence of a higher income elasticity of demand for grain in China, combined
with China's higher population growth rate, points towards additional constraints
on China's development programme which Japan was fortunate enough to escape,
constraints indicated by China's need to divert a substantial share of its foreign exchange
receipts to food imports in the 1960s and by China's need to mobilise the resources of
the entire nation to develop the agricultural sector at the same time. The lower income
elasticity of demand for food in Japan, related to the greater inequality of income
distribution there, as well as to the higher initial income levels, made Japanese development much easier.
In other respects too, initial conditions in Meiji Japan were more favourable to
development. Between 1872 and 1912, population increased from 34-8 million to
50-6 million: an average annual increase of 0-9% (Ogura, 1970, p. 11). In China, by
contrast, the 1953 population census indicated a population growth rate of 2-3 % (Aird,
1967, p. 353). Initially wavering with regard to population policy, China has taken
strong measures to limit population increase since the critical food-shortage years of
1960—61, and may have brought the increase rate down to about 1-5% per year at
present, although the evidence for this is far from firm (Orleans, 1975, p. 77).
With regard to the arable land area per head of population, both China and Japan
are characterised by low ratios, but the ratio was higher in China than it was in Japan.
In China, 107-9 million hectares were under cultivation in 1952 (Doi, 1957, p. 50),
when the population was 574-8 million (Aird, 1967, p. 353), so the land area was
0-19 hectares per capita. In Japan, the arable land area was 4-5 million hectares in
1884 (Ogura, 1970, p. 8) when the population was 380 million (Bank of Japan, 1966,
p. 12), so the land area was 0-12 hectares per capita. However, average agricultural
conditions are much more favourable, and cultivated land more fertile, in Japan
than in China. The importance of this can be seen from the fact that within China
during the 1930s, the average (mean) farm size in north China was nearly twice
that in south China (Buck, 1968, p. 45), but the productivity and prosperity per farm
were much higher in the south.
What is more important than the difference in average farm size is that Japan was
in a position to reclaim land at relatively moderate cost in Meiji times, continuing a
process carried out in the Tokugawa era. While it is not clear exactly how large the
cultivated area is in China today, the land reclaimed since liberation is generally
marginal land, land of limited productivity reclaimed at high cost, and its overall
contribution to the increase in agricultural output has been limited (see Perkins,
1975B, p. 353; Stavis, 1974, pp. 6-7). In Meiji Japan, by contrast, a substantial share
Meiji Japan and contemporary China
59
of the increase in agricultural output came from increasing the cultivated area. This
is shown in Table 1. Thus, in Japan, the greater ease of increasing the land under
cultivation placed less of a burden on technological change and the increase in odier
inputs as a means of raising agricultural output.
Other respects in which initial economic conditions favoured Japan lie in the areas
of indigenous agricultural technology and social continuity. With regard to the former,
Bruce Johnston (1969, p. 94) observes that:
Japan seems to have been unusual in the extent to which there was a backlog of promising innovations available. Wide diffusion of improved varieties and techniques developed by progressive
fanners during the Tokugawa period accounted for much of the increase in output and productivity during the early part of the Meiji period.
In the case of China there was no such indigenous backlog. China had to find new
means to raise productivity and the search for them was almost inevitably a painful one.
In literacy, too, the initial conditions favoured Japan, where by the end of the
Tokugawa period about 30% of the population had received some schooling. 'Literacy
is an almost certain sign of a rise above subsistence levels' (Hirschmeier, 1964, p. 75),
and R. P. Dore estimates that at the time of the Restoration 40-50 % of the boys and
T a b l e 1. Annual rates of growth of agricultural land area, land productivity and gross value added in
Japanese agriculture (%)
Years
1877-85
1885-94
1894-1905
1905-19
(1)
Arabic land
(2)
Land
productivity
(3)
Gross value
added
(4)
(1) asa
percentage of (3)
0-37
0-42
0-55
0-80
1-99
1-07
1-18
0-98
2-36
1-49
1-73
1-78
15-7
28-2
31-8
44-9
Sourct: Ohkawa (1969), pp. 7, 11.
possibly 15% of the girls were receiving some formal, outside-the-home schooling
(cited in Crawcour, 1965, p. 34). Herbert Passin (1965, p. 44) presents estimates,
which he suggests may be some 15 % or so on the conservative side, showing an increase
in average school attendance from 325,432 prior to 1829 to 767,265 between 1830 and
1853 and to 1,143,168 between 1854 and 1867. He indicates 1-3 million as a more
likely figure for the period just before the Meiji Restoration, but, whether or not the
figures are underestimates, the growth in attendance is quite marked.
The high degree of literacy attained in late Tokugawa Japan is a further indicator
of the size of the surplus, besides representing an 'investment in human capital' that
created decidedly favourable conditions for subsequent development. Table 2 shows
the literacy rate of different social groups in the early Meiji period. What is especially
striking among the figures cited there is the almost 100% literacy of village leaders, and
this helps to explain their central role in the introduction of new technology in the
countryside, particularly in the early Meiji period, when rich peasants were themselves
more actively engaged in farming than in the late Meiji period, when absentee landlordship became pronounced. In China, by contrast, despite an increase in primary
school enrolment from 24,391,000 in 1949-50 to 90,000,000 a decade later (Orleans,
1967A, p. 337) and the enrolment of as many as 40,000,000 adults in 'anti-illiteracy
60
V. D. Llpph
classes', the Minister of Education complained in 1956 that almost 80% of the population was still illiterate (Orleans, 1967B, p. 506).
The areas, by contrast, in which China enjoyed the greatest advantage in initial
conditions include resource endowments and industrial development. Although China
is much richer in resources than Japan, however, resource endowments were not a
major factor in the early development of either country. China's advantage in prior
industrial development was significant, on the other hand, and must be considered in
evaluating China's relative performance.
Much of the government-sponsored industrial development in early Meiji Japan had
direct antecedents in government-sponsored industrial development in the Tokugawa
period, but the scale of the earlier efforts was limited and the technology quite primitive
(Smith, 1955, presents a precise summary of the industrial antecedents). Although
T a b l e 2 . Literacy rates of different social groups, early Meiji period
Social group
Samurai:
men
women
Merchants in large cities (figure for women probably
somewhat higher than samurai group)
Merchants in smaller towns and rural areas
Artisans in large cities
Artisans in smaller towns and rural areas
Village notables
Village middle strata
Lower peasant levels
Peasants in more isolated areas
Priests
Others
Estimated
literacy rate
(% of group)
almost 100
50
70-80
50-60
50-60
40-50
almost 100
50-60
30-40
20
N.A C
N.A.C
Size of group as
% of total
population*' "
3-9-26-5
2-5-23-4
52-4-89-6
0-8-2-5
0-0-3-0
Sources: Taeuber (1958), p. 28, and UNESCO (1971), p. 104.
Notes: ' The group sizes indicated are the range for 16 han (prefectures) in 1867.
* The group-size figures should be interpreted with some caution; samurai engaged in handicraft production, for example, would be registered as samurai rather than as artisans.
c
Estimates not available.
China's manufacturing industry in 1949 was quite small in relation to the size of the
country, a definite start had been made in industrial development. Particularly significant here is the development of the engineering industry in Shanghai and of heavy
industry—especially iron and steel—in Manchuria (Rawski, 1975). Limited as it was,
the industrial base of China did help to create conditions favourable to the rapid
industrial development that has marked the period since liberation.
With regard to international economic relations, it would appear that neither
country had a decisive advantage. Both countries, facing the threat of exploitation by
more powerful states, followed policies which put primary emphasis on self-reliance.
China received foreign assistance in the 1950s in the form of loans from the Soviet
Union, but during the First Five Year Plan (1953-57) Soviet assistance amounted to
only 1-57 billion yuan, some 3% of the total state investment of 49-3 billion yuan
Mdji Japan and contemporary China
61
(Li, Choh-ming, 1967, p. 199). The Soviet assistance was quite significant, however,
as it was concentrated on key industrial projects and also provided major technological
assistance, sometimes associated with the creation of entire new industries; starting
later historically, China had the potentiality for benefiting from the higher level of
world technological development, and Soviet assistance helped to realise some of this
potentiality. On the other hand, from 1956 to 1965, when the debt was fully repaid,
China was making net repayments to the Soviet Union—in effect making a financial
contribution to Soviet development when the need for funds at home was most critical.
Furthermore, China was confronted through the 1950s and 60s by a partial economic
boycott from the capitalist countries, which precluded alternative sources of technological borrowing.
Although Japan did not receive any significant financial assistance from abroad during
the 19th century, it did rely heavily on technological borrowing, and this has been a
hallmark of Japanese development until recent times. Furthermore, Japan was never
faced with the exclusion from world markets that China experienced, and the growth
of exports has played a major role in Japanese development since early in the Meiji
period.
It should also be noted that imperialism contributed to Japanese development
from the time of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894—95, with Japan benefiting from indemnities, expanded markets and new sources of raw materials; this source of gain
was obviously closed to the Chinese, f On the other hand, the value of Soviet support
to China understates its strategic significance, so that it is difficult on balance to find
a decisive advantage for the development of either Japan or China in their early international economic relations.
There is, of course, no way to balance quantitatively the relative advantages of the
Chinese and Japanese economies on the eve of modernisation, but the evidence seems
to point overwhelmingly in the direction of substantially more favourable initial
conditions in Japan. This evidence includes especially the larger surplus; a lower
income elasticity of demand for food, associated with higher real income and more
unequal income distribution; much less population pressure; a greater potential for
low-cost land reclamation; a backlog of indigenous technological innovations in agriculture, the dissemination of which could permit rapid output growth without requiring
substantial new material inputs; and a much higher literacy rate.
Against these, China had the advantage of a more prolonged history of industrial
development, greater land area per capita and greater resources. The land area difference has little meaning in this case, since climate and other conditions are generally
more favourable in Japan, and the resource difference did not play a central role in
the first quarter-century of Chinese development, although its significance can be
expected to grow in the future. Only the first of these gave China a distinct advantage,
and it could not by itself counterbalance the numerous advantages in initial conditions
that Japan possessed.
t Between 1894 and 1914, substantial potential deficits in Japan's balance of payments were alleviated
by Chinese indemnity payments of 361-31 million yen paid in gold (Sinha, 1969, pp. 131-132). Other
sources of foreign capital, mainly national bonds sold overseas, were still more important; imported capital
increased rapidly from the turn of the century, reaching 1,969-6 million yen by 1913 (Takahashi, 1969,
p. 301). Thus Japan received foreign support between 1894 and 1914 of about one US dollar per annum
on a ptr capita basis (Sinha, 1969, pp. 132—133), or more than ten times the average annual per capita
economic aid China received from the Soviet Union in the 1950s, even before allowing for the depreciation
of the dollar between the two periods.
62
V. D. Lippit
3. Capitalist and socialist development
After defining the dominant class interest in Japan and China, this section attempts to
show how the difference between the two countries in this respect was reflected in
their development patterns. The focus here on the relationship between class structure
and the nature of development is not meant to deny the importance of institutional,
cultural and other factors, but rather to show that class structure is a factor of great
importance in determining the nature of economic development, and that the differing
development processes in China and Japan can be understood only when the issue of
class is placed in the foreground.
The character of the dominant classes in the Chinese revolution is well known. With
revolutionary intellectuals taking a leading role, the success of the revolution was
based on the commitment and active participation of poor and landless peasants
especially, and of workers as well; the revolution had a mass basis that is without
historical precedent (Belden, 1970; Hinton, 1966; Selden, 1971). In the case of Japan,
by contrast, identification of the dominant classes is less obvious. Following the argument of Thomas Smith (1955), it is suggested here that the Meiji restoration of 1868
was led by an alliance between middle-level samurai and a class of rich peasantentrepreneurs in the countryside, a class engaged in money-lending, commerce,
landowning and small-scale manufacture.
During the 250 years of peace in the Tokugawa era that preceded the Meiji Restoration
of 1868, substantial economic change undercut the formally recognised hereditary
class hierarchy of, in descending order, samurai (professional warriors), peasants,
artisans and merchants. This was an age of considerable commercial development
and the rise of great cities; by the 18th century, the population of Edo (Tokyo) appears
to have reached one million, while that of Osaka and Kyoto reached 400,000 each
(Hall, 1970, p. 210). The samurai class, deprived of its ostensible function by the peace,
turned ideally to intellectual and ethical concerns, but for the vast majority,
impoverished by a fixed rice stipendf in the face of steadily rising living expenses,
earning a living became a pressing problem. While 20-30 koku of rice (about 130
bushels) were needed to sustain one family and the upper samurai received 100 koku
and more, the lower samurai in a Kyushu han received only 7-15 koku (Hirschmeier,
Table 3. Income distribution among direct vassals of the house of Mori, daimyo of the Choshu han, late
Tokugawa period
T
Income
Over 100 koku
Over 70 and less than 100
Over 50 and less than 70
Over 40 and less than 50
Under 40
Total
Number of families
. ,
in the group
661
202
339
472
4001
5675
Source: Craig (1961), p. 113.
t Sometimes even fixed stipends were cut when the daimyo, himjdf in financial itraits, 'borrowed'
half the stipend (Hirschmeier, 1964, p. 49). This became fairly common practice by the late Tokugawa
period.
Meiji Japan and contemporary China
63
1964, p. 50). Intermarriage between upper and lower samurai became rare; they came
to use different styles of speech and writing and lived in different kinds of houses (ibid.).
Data gathered by Albert Craig (1961) show the income distribution among the 5675
direct vassals of the house of Mori, the daimyo (lord) of the Choshu han, late in the
Tokugawa period (see Table 3). According to a key official in the han bureaucracy,
a Choshu samurai with an income less than 100 koku of rice could not possibly meet
his expenses (Craig, 1961, p. 75).
The highest ranking vassals of die daimyo were the eight elder houses, with incomes
ranging from 5000 to 16,000 koku of rice (Craig, 1961, pp. 100-111). After this group
came the 62yorigumi families, with incomes ranging from 250 to 5000 koku. Theyorigumi
and elder houses both had vassals of their own. These two groups, together witii the
daimyo, constitute die upper samurai of the han. The next group was die ogumi, whose
1378 members had incomes ranging from 40 to 250 koku.
The above figures are quite revealing when considered in conjunction widi the
incomes of the members of (Choshu han) government cliques in die 1840s and 1850s.
Craig provides the income statistics for the twenty principal members of diese cliques.
Their incomes ranged from 46 to 202 koku. While die elders always held the highest
titular positions in die han government, policy was effectively determined by die
various cliques as diey alternated in power. And all diese clique members of die governing bureaucracy were members of die ogumi stratum of samurai. This stratum of
administrators constitutes the middle samurai, and it was samurai from diis stratum
that took the most active role in die Meiji restoration. The vast majority of samurai,
the lower samurai, had incomes of less dian 40 koku and were effectively shut out of
han government. Hirschmeier (1964, p. 50-51) describes the condition of the lower
samurai throughout Japan:
Although the fortunes of all samurai declined drastically in the later Tokugawa period, the lower
samurai had to work. The upper samurai could go on living as a leisured class, though with
fewer luxuries and less display. The more impoverished samurai were forced to start some kind
of home employment perhaps as early as the middle of the eighteenth century; it was already
common practice in the first decade of the nineteenth century. They sold goldfish and carvings,
made paper fans and lanterns, lacquer ware, umbrellas. They also entered widely into the production of sugar and tea and the manufacture of porcelain. Silkworm raising, spinning and
weaving were their most common occupations.
In view of die foregoing discussion, it is highly misleading in a basic sense to speak
of the samurai class. At die end of die Tokugawa period, the upper samurai remained a
conservative leisure class opposed to reform, die lower samurai worked for a living and
the middle stratum was engaged largely in carrying out administrative functions,
including economic administration, widiin die han. The leaders of die Restoration
movement tended to come largely from this middle stratum. They gained die support
of die lower samurai, whose plight was desperate and who responded to the reactionary
rhetoric of the restoration, and incorporated die more upwardly mobile of diem into
their numbers, but for the most part the plight of the poor samurai, die majority of die
samurai, remained desperate well into the Meiji era: they were not the beneficiaries
of its reforms. In Hiroshima prefecture in 1883, for example, diere were 7735 samurai
households, of which '1720 had achieved economic subsistence, 4374 scarcely had die
necessities of life, 1167 were in severe straits, and 474 were completely unable to sustain
themselves' (Hirschmeier, 1964, p. 66).
64
V. D. Lippit
Since the samurai did not constitute a homogeneous class, the common characterisation of the Meiji Restoration as a samurai feat is highly misleading. Although the middle
samurai-administrators and some of the lower samurai did indeed take the leadership
role, they could not have carried out the Meiji revolution alone and their participation
cannot in itself explain its class content and nature.f Their role has a direct counterpart
in that of the revolutionary intellectuals in China, whose role was critical in making
revolutionary discontent articulate, conscious and purposeful, but who could no more
have carried out a revolution without the support of the rising class than a pilot without
a plane can fly. In China, the class which gave body and substance to the revolution
was the poor peasant class especially. In Japan it was the rural capitalist-landlords
who had emerged during the Tokugawa period.
During the second half of this period, Japan's sharply rising surplus was both the
cause and consequence of the rise of this class. There was no sharp distinction between
the rich peasants, landlords, traders, money-lenders and small-scale manufacturers
in the Tokugawa countryside, and members of the rural upper stratum moved readily
among these roles, often carrying out several at the same time. The majority of the
putting-out masters, for example, remained landlords and carried on usury and trade
at the same time (Hirschmeier, 1964, p. 85). Considerable capital flowed into land
reclamation, where tax reductions and rental rates as high as 65—70% of the yield
afforded especially high returns (Hirschmeier, 1964, p. 75). Agricultural processing
was also developed vigorously in such fields as the manufacture of sake, miso and soy
sauce; 'in almost every village one rich farmer had a brewery' (Hirschmeier, 1954,
p. 102).
Merchants engaged in much larger-scale trade, based for the most part in Osaka,
also increased in number and influence during Tokugawa times, but as a class these
played no significant role in the Restoration. They were completely tied into the existing
feudal order, with the shogun and daimyo granting them monopoly privileges in
exchange for their services, which included among other things provisioning and lending
money to the increasingly hard-pressed rulers. Most of the large merchants quite
naturally remained highly conservative during the Restoration movement. Here we
can see direct parallels with the large merchants in imperial China and with those in
feudal Europe, whose interests were closely bound up with the existing order and who
could hardly be expected to assume a subversive posture.
In the case of Europe, as in the case of Japan, it was not the old merchant capital
that underlay the revolutionary capitalist transformation of society, but the initially
smaller-scale capital more directly tied to productive activity (Dobb, 1963, chs. I,
III and IV). The rich-peasant capitalists of Japan, restless with formal discrimination,
irked by the impediments placed in the way of commerce and industry by feudal
regulations—especially those protecting the urban guild monopolists—and possibly
fearful of their own safety, as the class cleavage and conflict within the villages grew
while the strength of feudal government declined, strongly supported the revolutionary
movement. Given its social position, this class could not assume the leadership of such
a movement, but it could and did support the middle and lower samurai, who did.
The case for understanding the Meiji revolution as a collaborative enterprise of rural
capitalists and middle-lower samurai is brilliantly put by Thomas Smith (1955), who
•f Although I have generally used the common term 'Meiji Ratoration' in this essay, I have felt impelled
here, in discussing its class basis, to use the more precise term 'revolution'. Until about 1890, both Japanese
and foreigners often used the term 'Meiji revolution' (Smith, 1955, p. 101).
Meiji Japan and contemporary f!h*M
65
goes on to observe that the samurai 'alliance with a landlord-merchant class among
the peasantry helps explain the revolutionary use of power against the feudal system
after 1867'.f
Ultimately, the class nature of a revolution must be evaluated not in terms of the
subjective motives of those who participate in it, but in terms of the class interests it
objectively serves. In China, the redistribution of land and income in favour of the
poor peasants during the land reform, the stress on raising rural welfare and incomes
that has been especially evident since the Cultural Revolution's start in 1966, and
the greatly improved conditions of urban workers make the class-cast of the Chinese
revolution unmistakable. Table 4, which shows the redistribution of income among
the peasants of Hunan province after liberation, is one indicator of the class basis of
the Chinese revolution; the increasing equality in China contrasts strongly with the
increasing inequality (discussed below) in Japan.
Table 4. Per capita income of peasants in Hunan province, China
Income, 1952 yuan
1936
Per capita'
69-71
59-2
78-8
118-8
127-3
Poor peasants
Middle peasants
Rich peasants
Landlords
1952
70-44
1956
83-2
83-5
86-2
102-6
75-3
Source: Chen, Nai-ruenn (1967), p. 433, from data published by the Hunan Statistical Bureau.
* Lijted in the source as 'per household', an evident error because the following rows (poor peasants
etc.) are listed as per capita. Average consumption per peasant household for China as a whole in
1955 was 454 yuan (Chen, 1967, p. 431) and the data are in line with per capita but not per household
figures for other provinces.
Although the difference in the class content of the revolutions in the two countries
has had a pervasive influence on the character of their development, its influence
can perhaps be seen most clearly in three areas: the distribution of income and wealth,
the welfare of the people in the course of development, and the financing of development.
These areas are of course inter-connected, as can be seen most directly in the case
ofJapan.
In 1873, the agricultural taxes in Japan, which had been payable in kind, were
replaced by a nationally uniform money tax of 3 % of the assessed price of the land
plus 1% more for local governments (Ogura, 1970, p. 5). In reality, there was no
market for much of the land and the assessed price really reflected normal yield expectations. Set at levels as high as the peasantry could possibly bear and more—the 200
peasant rebellions in the first ten years of the Meiji period were greater in number by
far than in any decade of the Tokugawa era (Smith, 1955, p. 30)—the land tax siphoned
off, according to one estimate, close to 20 % of the entire agricultural product between
1878 and 1887 (Ranis, 1969, p. 48) and provided the financial basis for the entire early
Meiji modernisation programme, including industrial development. Although the
tax rate was reduced to a total of 3 % of the assessed value of the land (of which 2-5 %
was the national tax) in 1877, the real tax burden increased sharply between 1880
t See especially ch. II; the quotation is from p. 22. Strong supporting evidence for Smith's thesis is
provided by Craig (1961), who cites important instances of lamurai-rich-pcasant alliances or co-operation
within the Choshu han.
66
V. D. Lippit
and 1890 as a result of deflation and of the increase in local and consumption taxes
(Ogura, 1970, pp. 17-18); the deflation alone forced the peasant to sell 42% more of
his crop to meet his tax obligations in 1885 than in 1881 (Smith, 1955, p. 81).
Although the Japanese peasants were not well off in the 1870s, their situation deteriorated rapidly in the 1880s:
One index of this is the sale of agricultural land for non-payment of taxes. Paul Mayet, a German
economist employed by the Japanese government at this time, states that 367,744 holders lost
their land for non-payment of taxes between 1883 and 1890. Since the earliest occupational
statistics show a total of 3,121,075 independent holders in 1888, something of the order of 11 per
cent of all peasant proprietors were dispossessed for non-payment of taxes in a seven-year period.
This, of course, tells but part of the story of agrarian distress. It is probable that only in exceptional
cases was land surrendered for back taxes; ordinarily, a peasant would borrow, even at the ruinous
rates prevailing in rural districts, before letting his land go to the state for a small part of its
value, and it seems all but certain that more land was taken by foreclosure than was sold for
taxes (Smith, 1955, pp. 82-83).
Under these conditions, the proportion of agricultural land worked by tenants, which
had been rising during the Tokugawa period, received a renewed upward stimulus,
increasing from 34-2 % in 1883-84 to 40-0% in 1892, and reaching 44-5% in 1903 and
45-5% in 1913 (Ogura, 1970, p. 18). The decrease in the proportion of owner-farmers
among farm households and the increase in tenant-farmers is shown in Table 5.
T a b l e 5 . Changes in the composition of farm families in Japan classified by owner-farmer and tenant-farmer
(in % )
Year
1883-84
1888
1899
1902
1907
1912
Owner-farmers
37-4
33-3
35-4
33-9
33-7
32-5
c
farmers
42-9
45-1
38-4
380
37-7
39-8
Tenant-farmers
19-7
21-6
26-2
28-1
28-6
27-7
Total
100
100
100
100
100
100
Sourct: Ogura (1970), p. 18.
The figures noted above tend to understate the significance of tenancy, because a
higher proportion of the more productive paddy land than of the dry land was cultivated by tenants; in 1913, 50 % of the paddy land and 40 % of the dry land was farmed
by tenants (Ogura, 1970, p. 8). In 1887, 73-1 % of the gainfully occupied population
was in the agricultural sector (Ohkawa and Rosovsky, 1973, p. 10), so that conditions
there are a fairly good indicator of national welfare generally. In the same year, tenants
were paying typically 58 % of the paddy yield and 56 % of the dry land yield as rent
(Hirschmeier, 1964, p. 107). Table 6 shows the division of net agricultural output
between the landowner, the state and the tenant. The estimates for the earlier years
appear to be rougher than for the later ones and are based on shares of gross output,
whereas the estimates for the later years are based on shares of net output. What is
particularly striking in these data is that the landowner was generally receiving substantially more than 3 parts to every 2 retained by the tenant.
The Meiji period was one of generally rising prices, with the wholesale price index
increasing from 100 in 1868 to 242 in 1900 and 310 in 1912 (Bank ofJapan, 1966, p. 76).
Mdji Japan and contemporary China
67
Table 6. Relative shares in agriculture in Japan
Years
Landowners
1868
1873
1874-76
1877
1878
% of total product
State
18
34
55
50
56-5
Rent as a % of net
agricultural output
60-4
56-0
50-7
59-1
57-9
1878-82
1888-92
1898-1902
1918-22
1928-32
50
34
13
18
11-5
Tenants
32
32
32
32
32
Tax burden as a % of Tenants' share as a %
net agricultural output of net agricultural output
16-9
15-5
121
9-2
9-7
22-7
28-5
37-2
31-7
32-4
Soura: Ranis (1969), p. 46.
Table 7. Relative price index for Japan of farm product to current inputs to agriculture
Year
Index (1877 = 100)
1877
100
1885
117-2
1894
107-8
1905
130-9
1919
197-3
Average annual rate of change (%)
1877-85
2-33
1885-94
-0-93
1894-1905
1-78
1905-19
303
Source: Ohkawa (1969), p. 29.
As Table 7 shows, the terms of trade were generally favourable to the agricultural
sector except for the period from 1885 to 1894. These conditions benefited the rural
landowners, who, as we have seen, were also the rural capitalists, because even when
the terms of trade moved against agriculture, this squeezed the poor peasants especially
a n d gave the landowners the opportunity to profit from their distress by acquiring
more land. T h u s there was increasing concentration of landownership, with the benefits
of the improving intersectoral terms of trade distributed most unequally. I n the Kinki
area, for example, 'the merchant-landlords succeeded a t times in reducing almost
entire villages to tenant status' (Hirschmeier, 1964, p . 108).
The village of Kuga near Kyoto illustrates this general trend. The percentage of large holdings
increased steadily at the expense of the middle-sized farms, while the percentage of small farms
stayed about the same. This indicates, of course, a sliding down on the scale from middle-sized
to small, and the exodus of the small farmers into tenancy. The number of landowners with
over 10 cho of land more than tripled, rising from 0-9% to 2-9% between 1875 and 1905, while
the medium farmers of one to two cho declined from 14-1% to 7-8% in the same period. A rich
vegetable-oil producer and merchant in this village lent money at 10% interest to other growers,
and demanded in addition that they sell their vegetables to him at 10% below the market price.
68
V. D. Lippit
In this fashion, rural money-lenders and manufacturer-merchants used the economic weakness
of small fanners to reduce them to tenant position. In the same village the rural capitalists
had succeeded by 1893 in enlarging their landholdings to 82% of all village land (Hirschmeier,
1964, p. 108).
Under these conditions, the supply of labour available for work at subsistence wages
swelled and wage rates were kept down.f Even where those who lost their land became
tenants, the share of the product which they could retain for themselves was too small
to meet even limited subsistence requirements and they were forced to engage in
subsidiary activities; since Tokugawa times, in fact, tenancy and small holdings had
been closely associated with the development of handicrafts as an essential source of
supplementary income (Smith, 1955, pp. 29-30). In the Meiji period, wage labour
increasingly replaced handicrafts as a means of supplementing family income. This is
shown clearly in the fact that the average workman in Meiji Japan was in fact a woman
—60% of the 418,140 factory workers in the 1893-97 period were women (Hirschmeier,
1964, p. 159)—usually a young woman operative in the textile industry, recruited from
the countryside and forced to work for a pittance under horrendous conditions to
eke out her family's subsistence.*
While wage rates were kept down, national income was growing, with gross national
expenditure (GNE) rising in terms of 1934—36 prices from 4330 million yen in 1887
to 6650 million yen in 1902, a 53-6% increase or 2-9% yearly—about 2-0% per capita
(Ohkawa and Rosovsky, 1973, p. 10; Bank of Japan, 1966, p. 12). The holding down
of wages and the increase in tenancy meant that an increasing share of the growing
national income was being channelled into the hands of rent and profit recipients.
In die urban sector of Meiji Japan, the creation and concentration of capital was
still more dramatic in form. Using tax revenues from the agricultural sector—and
sometimes bonds based on anticipated agricultural tax revenues—the Japanese government engaged in a vigorous programme of subsidies to private business and investment
in government enterprises. The subsidy programme generally failed, because there
were too many obstacles to the success of private enterprise in the first 15 years or so
of the Meiji era (Smith, 1955, pp. 52-53), but the government enterprise programme
had major consequences for the economic development of Japan. Before 1880, it was
the government which undertook to establish almost all modern enterprises. It took
the initial risks and bore heavy losses, but put modern industry on its feet. Once it
had done so, it sold off the enterprises at bargain prices—low in relation both to its
own investment and to prospective profits—to private interests, laying the foundation
for modern industrial development under private enterprise in Japan (only the silk
industry developed as a modern industry under primarily private auspices from the
start).
Government policy also contributed directly to the development of a labour force
bereft of the means of sustaining itself, one forced into wage labour, and the growing
inequality this inevitably entails. All tenancy came to be regarded as ordinary tenancy,
and restrictions against the arbitrary eviction of long-term tenants were eliminated.
t Accumulation based on growing inequality, the development of a proletariat by depriving people
of the means to provide for their own subsistence and the creation in the same manner of an 'unlimited'
supply of labour at subsistence wages make Japan's experience very much in accord with the models of
capitalist development proferred by Karl Marx in his discussion of primitive accumulation (1961, Part
VIII) and W. Arthur Lewis in his essay, 'Economic development with unlimited supplies of labour' (1970).
X The percentage of women in the factory labour force increased to 62-0% in 1909 and remained above
50% (at 52-6%) as late as 1930 (Cole and Tominaga, 1976, p. 60).
Meiji Japan and contemporary China
69
This policy of the government 'resulted in many cases in the denial or curtailment of
tenants' rights to the land' (Ogura, 1970, p. 124).
At the start of the Meiji era, Japan also had its counterpart of the enclosure movements. The principle was established that all land should be privately owned or belong
to the state. According to this, communalfieldsor forests that farm villagers had freely
used were seized by the state and retained or sold off to landlords or rich peasants,
in either event denying the villagers access to them. Limiting the villagers' ability to
provide for their own needs, these measures tended to force them into the labour market.
The detrimental impact of the early stages of capitalist modernisation on the welfare
of much of the population is also to be seen in Meiji Japan in the pattern of change
in real wages over time, in the hours worked and in the exploitation of women and
children. Table 8 shows that, until the turn of the century, real wages in manufacturing
Table 8. Index of real wages in manufacturing in Japan, 1882-1912 (1882=100)
Year
Index
Year
Index
1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
100
104-1
88-2
87-9
93-2
87-7
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
116-7
112-3
110-7
111-8
107-7
117-0
125-8
130-1
142-7
145-5
135-3
131-2
89-3
841
78-9
88-2
108-2
107-1
103-8
101-1
97-0
106-6
112-1
128-5
109-6
Source: Ohkawa tl al. (1967), p. 243.
showed considerable fluctuation but no more than a modest rising trend; between 1882
and 1902 the increase in real wages averaged 0-6% annually, while over the entire
period 1882-1912 the average annual increase was 0-9%. At the turn of the century,
even the workers in heavy industry, relatively well paid, 'could not live on their basic
wages alone and had to supplement their income with overtime. Often their children
also worked, and wives did piecework at home' (Hazama, 1976, p. 28). The wage
increases were much lower than the average 5% increase in industrial productivity
during that period (see Table A2 below), suggesting a rising profit share of national
income and growing inequality. The high mobility and relative independence of
Tokugawa artisans was replaced by tight factory discipline strongly resented by the
workers, f
t A 1903 report by the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce especially notes the general discontent
of educated factory workers (Hazama, 1976, p. 27).
70
V. D. Lippb
Table 9. Wages of female operatives in silk reeling factories, constant (1885-87) prices: Tamanashi
Prefecture, Japan, 1885-1911 (5-year averages)
1885-87
1888-92
1893-97
1898-1902
1903-07
1908-11
Real daily
wage
(sen)
Working
days
(hours)
11-6
11-9
14-1
12-5
12-6
130
11-5
11-7
11-9
12-0
12-5
13-1
Index (1885-87 = 100)
Real hourly •
wage
Real daily
Working
Real hourly
(sen)
wage
day
wage
1-01
1-01
1-19
1-04
1-01
1-02
100
102
122
108
109
113
100
102
103
104
109
114
100
100
118
103
100
100
Sourci: Tussing (1969), p. 211.
Nott: One ten ii a hundredth of a yen; in 1895, 1 yen was worth US$051 (Takahashi, 1969, p. 299).
Table 9 shows that the real hourly wage rate did not rise for everyone during the
Meiji period. Although the hourly wage rate remained low, the young women had
the chance to compensate for this by working long hours, and this they did increasingly,
as the average working day lengthened from 11-5 hours in 1885—87 to 13-1 hours
in 1908-11.
It has already been noted that 60% of the factory workers in 1893-97 were women.
The girls who worked in the spinning mills were recruited by special squads, first from
nearby farm villages and later from more remote areas, usually on the basis of an
employment contract of a few years in duration. Around 1900, according to data from
15 spinning firms, 13-1 % of the workers left the company in less than six months and
only 23-6% worked for the full term of the employment contract (UNESCO, 1971,
p. 21); between 1903 and 1914 well over half the new recruits left Kanebo's Hyogo
textile mill within the first six months (Saxonhouse, 1976, pp. 102-104). These are
quite striking figures for a society in which personal obligations are taken so seriously
and bear testimony to the revulsion with which the work was regarded. Why did they
do it at all ? They needed the money, or more precisely, the farm households of which
they were a part needed it.
The government was slow to take heed of the plight of women and child workers,
but once it did it moved with the speed of a tortoise to bring about needed reforms.
In 1911,
the government enacted the Factory Act, which is recognised as one of the first pieces of social
legislation ofJapan. However, because of the government's priority goal of increasing production
and protecting industries, implementation of this Act was delayed for five years. Moreover,
the provision prohibiting the employment of juvenile and female workers at nights was given
a stay of fifteen years (UNESCO, 1971, p . 56).
Throughout the Meiji period the Japanese tax structure remained highly regressive.
As we have seen, the burden in the agricultural sector fell largely on the poor and middle
peasants, with only the rich peasant-landlords positioned to take advantage of the
falling real burden of the land tax as prices rose over time and the tax remained fixed.
As Table 10 shows, the next tax to assume prominence was the excise tax, which was
levied especially on 'necessities' like sake, shoyu, sugar and textiles; the profits from
government monopolies in tobacco, camphor and salt function like the excise tax and
are included with it in Table 10, which shows the sources of government revenue over time.
Mdji Japan and contemporary China
71
An income tax was not introduced until 1887. It was set at a flat rate of 3 %, and
die definition of the tax base—which excluded all interest on government and other
savings bonds, 40 % of dividend receipts and all life insurance premiums—turned it
into a highly regressive levy (Ranis, 1969, p. 49). The heavy reliance on land and
excise taxes in Japan's early development put the major burden of financing development on the mass of the population and a light burden on the landlord and industrialmerchant classes. In considering the pattern offinancingJapanese economic development in the Meiji era, the class bias, the spur to growing inequality in the distribution
of income and wealth, and the detrimental effects on the welfare of the people become
evident.
Table 10. Composition of central government tax receipts (in current million yen)
Car
Land
tax
% of
total
Excise
taxes
% of
total
Income
tax
% of
total
Customs
duties
% of
total
^hccl'
ancous
% of
totaj
taxes
1870
1880
1890
1900
1910
11-3
42-3
40-1
46-7
76-3
73-9
72-9
51-7
24-6
15-9
—
5-8
16-9
54-4
89-6
—
10-0
21-8
28-6
18-7
—
—
1-1
6-4
31-7
—
—
1-4
3-4
6-6
1-1
2-6
4-4
17-0
39-9
7-1
4-5
5-7
8-9
8-3
2-9
7-3
15-1
65-5
241-4
18-9
12-6
19-5
34-4
50-4
Sourct: Ranis (1969), p. 43.
The socialist economic development of China marks a clear contrast to the Japanese
case in all these respects. Since the dominant classes—especially the poor peasants—
made up the vast majority of the population, we might expect to find heavy emphasis
in the Chinese development model on the welfare of the people and on equality, and
we would expect to find a different burden of development finance than that which
characterised the Japanese case. And indeed, examination of the Chinese development
experience bears out these expectations. Consider initially the distribution of income
and wealth.
Even more than Meiji Japan, China was a predominantly rural society at the time
of liberation (1949), with close to 90 % of the population living in the countryside (as
compared to 80% at present). Some 60-70% of the agriculturalists were poor and
landless peasants before liberation, barely able to eke out a living in 'normal' times
and falling below subsistence levels in times of adversity, when the death or sale of a
child was not uncommon (Yang, 1965, p. 18; Chen Han-seng, 1936, pp. 60-62). These
peasants were typically tenants, part-tenants, or farm labourers, or they owned
insufficient land to sustain themselves or their families (farm labourers were often too
poor to marry and have families). The main basis of class distinction in the countryside was land ownership. The middle peasants, some 20-30% of the farm population,
owned enough land to sustain themselves. The upper 10% of the rural population
owned more land than they could or would till themselves. The rich peasants, about
7% of the total, hired labourers to work under their direction and branched out into
brewing, money-lending, commerce and so forth. The landlord class, some 3% of
the total, rented out its land, engaged in the same types of activities as the rich peasants
(though with more emphasis on money-lending and commerce than on direcdy
productive activities), took a leading if informal role in local government administration, and provided the pool of educated manpower from which national government
72
V. D. LJppit
officials were drawn. This was the gentry class, and together with the rich peasants it
owed its social position to the unequal distribution of income and property in the
countryside.
One of the first major acts of the communist government in China—and one which
had already been substantially carried out in the liberated areas before 1949—was the
redistribution of landholdings. In the land reform, which was carried out mainly
from 1950 to 1952, some 44% of China's land area was redistributed to about 300 million
poor and landless peasants (Lippit, 1974, p. 95), with the basic objective of creating
roughly equal per capita holdings and providing each household with sufficient land
and means of production to sustain itself, which only the middle peasant and higher
classes had enjoyed previously. This is in sharp contrast to the changes in land holdings
which occurred in Meiji Japan, where growing concentration of ownership and progressive destitution of the farmers not only reflected a sharply differing dominant class
interest but also contributed to the development of an industrial proletariat and the
inequality-based higher savings rate that capitalist development normally requires.
The differences in the financing of early economic development in China and Japan
also reflect their differing class structures. In Japan, the surplus generated in the
agricultural sector was the ultimate source of development finance. As shown above,
the surplus was larger than in China, making it possible for Japan to mobilise it less
efficiently and still experience fairly rapid economic growth. Most of the surplus in
Japan was drawn into the hands of the rural landlord-merchant-industrialists, who
saved and invested part of it and built themselves fine homes plus all their accoutrements
with the remainder. The social opportunity cost of this mechanism of accumulation
is this leakage into luxury consumption, which is the source of the relative inefficiency
referred to above. Most of the remainder of the surplus was drawn off in land and other
taxes. The government used this for various purposes, including the putting down of
rebellions by samurai and peasants who discovered that the economic gains of the
restoration were not destined for them; however, from the standpoint of accumulation
what is especially important is the use of a part of the surplus for industrial development,
with the government subsidising private enterprises and creating its own enterprises which it subsequently turned over to the private sector (Smith, 1955). At the
same time, some of the surplus accumulated in the agricultural sector flowed into
industrial development as a consequence of direct investment by the rural elite and
by the transfer of their savings via financial intermediaries.
In China also the agricultural sector initially provided much of the surplus to finance
development, but the mode of its extraction was quite different from that in Japan.
Prior to the land reform, most of the surplus generated in the agricultural sector found
its way into the hands of the landowners, money-lenders and merchants, much as it
had in Japan, and some of it took the form of tax payments. The relative size of the
surplus was considerably smaller in China, however, making the task of development
finance much more difficult. Still, based on very conservative estimates, some 19%
of net domestic product in pre-revolutionary China had gone to rural property owners
or in tax payments to the government (Lippit, 1974, p. 70). This represents a minimum
estimate of the rurally generated surplus potentially available for development purposes.
The land reform in China took the central role in redistributing claims to the surplus,
with the poor and landless peasants constituting the initial beneficiaries. It became
the task of public policy then to re-extract a portion of their gains to finance economic
development. This was done partly through the new land tax, which made some 12-4 %
Melji Japan and contemporary China
73
of the surplus available for public investment, but more substantially through establishing intersectoral terms of trade that were initially against the agricultural sector
(compared to the pre-liberation benchmark years of 1930-36), which drew off an
additional 41-3% of the surplus (Lippit, 1974, ch. 3). This left some 46-3% of the
surplus in the hands of the poor and landless beneficiaries of the land reform. Subsequently, the terms of trade were turned increasingly in favour of the agricultural
sector and the profits generated within the industrial sector came to play the principal
role in further development finance.
Thus the differences between China and Japan in the financing of development
reflect clearly the different class bases of their modernisation. In Japan, the surplus
went to the rural elite, which divided it between investment and luxury consumption,
and to the government, which used it to establish the zaibatsu and other monopoly-type
capitalist industrial enterprises. In China, the surplus went initially to the poor and
landless peasants and a portion of it was then drawn off by the government to finance
socialist industrial development, still leaving the initial beneficiaries with a substantial
net gain.
Measures to secure a fairly high degree of equality in the distribution of income and
wealth have characterised Chinese development generally, and again these must be
understood in terms of the interests of the dominant classes effecting the Chinese
revolution. The so-called 'bureaucratic capitalist' institutions were taken over by the
new government soon after the revolution and direct control was assumed over smallerscale capitalist enterprises in the mid-1950s. Since the unequal ownership of property
is the major source of income differentials, the socialisation of industry, like the land
reform, played a major role in reducing inequality as well as in redistributing income
from owners to producers.
With regard to welfare, there is an abundance of evidence showing that the process
of development in China was much more conducive to the welfare of the population
than was its counterpart in Meiji Japan. In Japan the mechanism of accumulation
that promoted inequality could only have negative implications for the welfare of
the population. In China, not only was the accumulation mechanism different, but
also the facts that the revolution was carried out by classes constituting the vast majority
of the population and that the Chinese communist party was primarily peasant-based
made the satisfaction of popular welfare requirements a matter of high priority.
There is no single measure of popular welfare, but there are numerous indices.
Compare, for example, the eight-hour day, six-day week worked by men and women
workers in China with the 13-hour day, noted above in Table 9, of women factory
workers in Japan's Yamanashi prefecture at the end of the Meiji period. Women
workers in China today retire at age 55, men at 60 (5 years earlier for both sexes if
engaged in heavy work, as on the docks or in the mines) and both receive a pension equal
to 70 % of their pay just prior to retirement (normally the highest in their working
careers), a substantial amount, especially in the light of the complete absence of inflation
in present-day China. Of course, these welfare differences between China and Japan
must also be understood in terms of the differences between the 20th and 19th centuries,
differences in social conditions and so forth, but they are consistent with what we would
expect from the class differences between the two societies.
The differing experience with regard to inflation is in itself clearly related to the
dominant class interests in the two countries; the secular inflation in Japan tended to
redistribute income to profit recipients, while the price stability of China gives working
74
V. D. Lippit
people (i.e. everybody) security and assurance for the future. Table 11 compares the
inflation experience of the two countries. As Perkins (1975B, p. 362) notes, 'most of
the rise in [China's] rural income per capita over the past 20 years can be explained by
[the] improvement in agriculture's terms of trade'. One column in Table 11 shows the
prices of industrial products sold in rural areas; in urban areas the overall increase in
prices since 1952 is about the same and, as in the rural areas, there has been a slight
decline in the average price level since 1963, but prices crept up more during the 1950s.
Table 11. Wholesale price index in Japan and rural price indexes in China
Japan
Year
1868
1872
1876
1880
1884
1888
1892
1896
1900
1904
1908
1912
Index
(1868=100)
100
138
152
152
127
145
159
194
242
247
273
310
China (1952 = 100)
Purchase prcies Prices of industrial
products sold in
of farm and
rural areas
sideline products
82-2
98-3
100-0
110-1
113-8
113-2
116-6
122-4
125-1
154-7
156-2
160 +
91-2
100-5
100-0
98-5
100-2
101-4
100-4
101-6
101-0
114-3
114-0
NA
Prices of means
of production
sold in rural
areas
NA
NA
1000
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
NA
500
Year
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1963
1971
1973
Sources: For Japan, Asahi Shimbun Wholesale Price Index (Bank of Japan, 1966, p. 76).
For China, Perkins (1975B), p. 362.
Mole: NA means 'not available'.
The 'Matsukata' deflation from 1881 to 1884 makes the overall price rise in Japan less
pronounced than it otherwise would be, but far from promoting welfare, its whipsawing
effect was a terrible blow to the poor and middle farmers. In this sense it is not only
the long-run inflation rate that affects welfare but the magnitude of price fluctuations
as well, and in both respects we can see that the pattern of Japanese development was
inimical to the people's welfare.
Other striking indices of the people's welfare in China are the development of a
medical system of extraordinarily high quality for a less developed country, one that
stretches throughout the country and is accessible to all regardless of ability to pay (Sidel,
1973); the minimum guarantees people have regarding food and other basic necessities;
full employment; and the availability throughout the countryside of certain cultural
and other amenities typically found only in urban areas. These benefits have
accompanied substantial gains from the production of consumer goods in the industrial
sector, which rose from an index of 100 in 1952 to 568 in 1974 or at an average annual
rate of 8% (Field, 1975, pp. 149-150).
Most of the differences between China and Japan in their early development stages
with regard to welfare, inflation, development finance and the distribution of income
and wealth can be explained mainly in terms of the differences between the revolutionary classes that ushered in the eras of modernisation in the two countries. And a
Meiji Japan and contemporary China
75
number of the other differences between the two countries can be explained at least
in part in the same terms. It would be incorrect, however, to ignore the highly important
differences in culture, time, exogenous conditions and so forth that contributed to the
distinctive shape of development in each country and it is not the intention here to
belittle them. Rather, the aim has been to demonstrate the important part class interest
has played in shaping their different development experiences.
4. Macroeconomic performance comparisons
In comparing the macroeconomic performance of China and Japan, it is impossible
to establish simple causal relations between their economic systems and their performance, and that is not intended here. Rather, this section is meant primarily to throw
light on a number of basic questions implicit in the foregoing discussion. If China, faced
by more unfavourable initial conditions, was more successful in meeting the welfare
requirements of its population, did it do so at the cost of economic growth? In capitalist
Japan, the accumulation mechanism funneled a portion of the property share back into
investment, with the remainder leaking mainly into luxury consumption; was this in
fact associated with the lower investment ratios that one might expect ? In view of the
fact that the Japanese model is widely regarded as a 'successful' case of development,
one worthy of emulation, how does the performance of China's collectivised agriculture
and state-run industry measure up to the standard set by Japan ? Since the difference
in time between early Chinese and early Japanese development—-and the associated
differences in domestic and international conditions—make it difficult to interpret
differences in macroeconomic performance, the validity of the approach here must
be grasped in terms of the insights gained, rather than through attempts to attribute
direct causal significance to any single underlying factor.
Data on comparative national income growth and capital accumulation are presented
below; more detailed consideration of comparative agricultural and industrial growth
is given in the Appendix.
(i) National income growth
There are many formidable problems in the way of estimating economic growth in
Meiji Japan, especially in the early part of the period. In the industrial sector, modern
economic growth did not establish much steam until the mid- 1880s, and data on the
small-scale rural industries are fragmentary. A more serious problem exists in the
agricultural sector, but the evidence seems to support an agricultural growth rate of
about 1-7 % per year from the 1870s to the 1900s (Ohkawa and Rosovsky, 1973, p. 13).
There are no reliable estimates ofJapanese economic growth rates before the mid-1880s,
which Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973, p. 11) see as marking the starting point of modern
economic growth in Japan, but all indications are that it cannot have been higher
than that of the immediately succeeding period; the government was still concerned
in the first Meiji decade with putting down rebellions of samurai and peasants, its
industrial investment programme established pilot plants in key industries but was
quantitatively quite limited, private capital was simply unwilling to invest in the new
industries on a meaningful scale until the 1880s, and the Matsukata deflation of 1881—
84 also limited industrial expansion. Although the data in Table 12 then start with
the mid-1880s, they also indicate a maximum growth rate for the period between 1868
and the mid-1880s, a maximum rate that is unlikely in fact to have been attained.
76
V. D. Lippit
Table 12. Economic growth rates in Meiji Japan and contemporary China
Rate per decade (%)
Japan 1883/87-1908/12 (real GNP)
China (1) 1952-72 (real GNP)
(2) 1952-72 (real GDP)
35-9
71-5
74-4
Rate per annum
growth rate (%)
J a p a n 1887-1902 (real GNE)
China 1952-70 (real GDP)
per capita (%]
2-9
5-6
1-9
3-6
Sources: Japanese rate per decade from Ohkawa et al., cited in Kelley, Williamson and Cheetham
(1972), ch. 4, adjusted for 10% annual population growth 1885-1910 (Bank of Japan, 1966,
p. 12). China (1) from Ashbrook (1975), p. 23. China (2) from Perkins (1975A), p. 117,
which covers 1952-71, and Ashbrook for 1972 only. Rates per annum for Japan calculated
from data in Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973), p. 10. Rates for China calculated from
data in Perkins (1975A), p. 134. Note that Perkins's table shows too high rates of Japanese
growth, based on early estimates of agricultural growth that are now generally recognised
as much too high. The per capita growth rate for China assumes an average rate of population
growth of 2-0%.
The data in Table 12 indicate that, despite the much more difficult initial conditions
China encountered, the growth of national income on both an aggregate and per
capita basis has been substantially more rapid in post-revolutionary China than in
Japan during the Meiji period. Furthermore, data presented in the Appendix show
that China's aggregate agricultural performance was somewhat better than, and her
industrial performance substantially superior to, that of Meiji Japan.
(ii) Capital formation
One of the important tasks of economic development is raising the national savings
rate. Table 13 compares the early modern performance of the Chinese and Japanese
economies in doing so; it shows that China was able to marshal a much larger share of its
national income for capital formation purposes. These data may be related to the
mechanism of accumulation in the two countries. Japan relied on increasing saving by
channeling an increasing share of national income to the high-saving income groups,
but this process entails an inevitable leakage into luxury consumption expenditure as
well. While this leakage was not as severe in Japan as in most other countries, it was
indeed present.
Table 13. Rates of capital formation in China and Japan
Japan, gross fixed capital formation/GNE
China, GDCF/GDP (1952 in current prices, 1957
and 1970 in 1957 prices)
1887
1902
13-5%
13-6%
1952
1957
1970
19-5%
21%
28-29%
Sources: Japan, Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973), p. 10; China, Perkins (1975A), p. 134.
Mdji Japan and contemporary China
77
5. Conclusion
In the capitalist accumulation of Meiji Japan, concentrating wealdi and income
contributed to increasing savings and investment on the one hand, and depriving the
poor peasants especially of the means of subsistence gave birth to a proletariat on the
other. From this basic accumulation mechanism many consequences follow. The most
important of these is the sacrifice of the people's welfare as a condition for early capitalist
development. The image of young girls fleeing the factories in which they were forced
to work 13 hours a day for a penny an hour is a vivid one. Altiiough the question of
emigration has not been discussed here, we can readily imagine the wrenching poverty
that forced tens of thousands of Japanese, people widi a stronger sense of 'home' than
perhaps those of any other modern nation, to emigrate to die United States, Brazil
and elsewhere. Their poverty existed in die midst of an ample surplus in the agricultural
sector and rapid growth in national income per capita.
The mechanism of capital accumulation in China was quite different. There the
surplus was redirected from die elite classes of traditional society, the owners of property,
to the masses and to the state for collective accumulation. This is the basic initial mode
of socialist accumulation, helping to satisfy bodi die immediate and long-range needs
of the population, whose interest is after all die underlying dirust of socialist revolution.
In the Chinese case, die evidence tiiat popular welfare and accumulation increased
in tandem has been extensively documented (e.g. Lippit, 1972). The pattern of accumulation—and of development generally—in any country depends in large measure on
which classes play die leading role, and especially on whether or not a mass class is
dominant, for it is a matter of course diat classes in power give priority to dieir own
interests. In China, die poor peasants were die leading class in die revolution, while
in Japan the rising rural capitalist-landowners allied with middle-level samurai brought
the nation into its age of modernisation. It is natural diat die satisfaction of elite interests
characterised Japanese development and die satisfaction of mass interests—in accumulation as well as current consumption—characterised Chinese development.
Altiiough questions of political economy give die basic shape to die pattern of development, national history, social structure and initial conditions all have highly significant
roles to play. It has not been possible to go into diese fully here, but an attempt has
been made to present a comparison of die most important initial conditions in contemporary China and Meiji Japan. The main conclusion reached is diat die much more
unfavourable initial conditions in China made die process of initiating and sustaining
economic development tiiere substantially more difficult tiian in Japan, and diat
despite diis, die development processes generated permitted sustained growdi to be
achieved widiout die welfare sacrifices diat characterised Meiji Japan and are a
prominent feature of many non-socialist less-developed countries today.
Appendix: Comparative agricultural and industrial growth in post-liberation
filling and Meiji Japan
Considering the enormous problems confronting Chinese agriculture, the Chinese performance
has been a creditable one, relative to other countries in their early modernisation periods as well
as to Japan. China could not easily increase its cultivated area and at the same time it had no
'backlog' of improvements in traditional technology readily available for dissemination. Rather,
the development of Chinese agriculture required, among other things, substantial capital inputs
before the industrial sector was capable of supplying these on any scale.
78
V. D. Lippit
(1) The growth of agricultural output
Table A l . Rates of growth of agricultural output for selected countries in their early modernisation periods
Rate of growth of agricultural output
Japan, 1870s to 1900s
China (1) 1957 to 1970
(2) 1952 to 1973
France, 1825-34 to 1855-64
Sweden, 1861-65 to 1891-95
Germany, 1816-61
Russia, 1885-95 to 1905-14
Aggregate (%)
Per capita (%)
1-7
2-3
2-5
1-3
1-7
1-9
2-3
0-8
0-3
0-5
Sources: Japan, Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973), p. 13. China (1) calculated from data in Perkini
(1975A), p. 154. China (2) calculated from data in Ajhbrook (1975), p. 23. Data for other
countries from Hayami and Yamada (1969), pp. 111—112.
Note: A higher growth rate for Japan was initially estimated by Ohkawa (1957) and criticised by
Nakamura (1966), whose own 0-9% estimate of the aggregate rate has nnce been shown to be
too low (Johnston, 1969, p. 59; Hayami and Yamada, 1969, p. 111).
While the aggregate performance of the agricultural sector in China has been superior to that
of Japan, the per capita performance of Japan has been superior. This reflects the fact that the
population of Japan grew at about 0-9% per year during die Meiji period (slighdy less at die
beginning of die period, slighdy more at die end of die period), while diat of China grew much
more rapidly. There is considerable scholarly dispute over die size and rate of growdi of die
Chinese population, but a growdi rate of about 2% per year would seem to be a reasonable
estimate for die period covered, although it is likely to have gone below diat by die end of die
period and to have declined further since (Orleans, 1975).
(2)
Industrial development
As Table A2 shows, industrial development in contemporary China has also been much more
rapid dian diat in Meiji Japan. Several considerations should be kept in mind, however, in
Table A2. Rate of growth of industrial output in contemporary China and Meiji Japan
Japan, index of net output of mining
and manufacturing
v
m r
1887
Index
Annual growdi
(1887 = 100)
rate
100
China, index of die gross value of industrial
production
Year
Index
(1952 = 100)
1952
100
1957
208
1970
717
1975
1121
15-8%
5-2%
1902
213
1912
336
Annual growdi
rate
4-7%
• 10-0%
9-4%
Sources: Japan, Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973), pp. 10, 284.
China, 1952: Field (1975), p. 149.
China, 1957-75: Field (1976), p. 17.
Meiji Japan and contemporary China
79
interpreting these data. The most important of these is the fact, noted in the discussion of initial
conditions, that Japan was creating modem industry almost from scratch, whereas China, limited
as its industrial base was, had a long prior history of industrial development. Measured against
this, however, is China's decision deliberately to sacrifice some growth in order to spread industrial
development more evenly around the country (Field, 1976). Another consideration to keep in
mind is that the indices below include 'traditional' as well as modern industry. Although both
countries would show more rapid growth if the data were limited to modern industry, the weight
of traditional activities was greater in Japan, and the slower rate of growth of Japanese manufacturing in part reflects this.
The Japanese figures in Table A2 are net, the Chinese gross, and this creates an upward bias
for the Chinese figures, as depreciation increases over time when growth is taking place. The
Chinese figures include utilities as well as mining and manufacturing, whereas the Japanese
figures exclude utilities, but this difference does not seem to impart any strong bias to the figures.
Despite the caveats noted, then, Table A2 does present a good indication of the comparative
orders of magnitude of the rates of industrial development in the two countries. For a long time,
the only index of industrial production in Japan going back to the beginning of the Meiji period
was that compiled at the Nagoya Commercial College (it is included in Bank of Japan, 1966).
Although it grossly overstates the growth of industrial production (Shionoya, 1968, pp. 70-72),
it has been widely used in studies of the Japanese economy (e.g. Lockwood, 1954; Shinohara,
1962; Yoshino, 1968), creating a common misconception that Japanese industrial growth was
much more rapid than in fact it was. The data in Table A2 are based on the more recent studies
of Ohkawa and Rosovsky (1973), and are roughly consistent with indices developed by Yuichi
Shionoya, who estimates manufacturing output grew at an average rate of 4-53% between 1874
and 1905, and Y. Yasuba (Shionoya, 1968, pp. 70-72).
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