Why the Sprouts of Capitalism Were Delayed in China

In China the sprouts of capitalist relations of production began in the late Ming, approximately two centuries later than in Western Europe. By the mid-Qing they had developed to a certain extent. But in agriculture they were so puny as to be hardly worth mentioning; moreover, they represented an extremely small proportion of handicrafts. After over three hundred years, on the eve of the Opium War, the sprouts still had not reached the stage of workshop handicraft (gongchang shougongye). They were far behind Western Europe.1 This section discusses why the sprouts of capitalism developed so belatedly in China. The reasons for this are largely also the basic reasons why China's feudal society lasted so long, and are one basic source of modern China's economic backwardness. According to Marx, "The economic structure of capitalistic society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former." And the development of a commodity economy "has a more or less dissolving influence everywhere