An Essay on China’s Development After the Demographic Golden Age - Original PDF
نویسندگان: Xueyuan Tian
خلاصه: Su Shi, a well-known ci poet of the Song Dynasty, wrote a seven-character quatrain: “It is a range viewed in face and peaks viewed from the side, assuming different shapes viewed from far and wide. Of Mountain Lu we cannot make out the true face, for we are lost in the heart of the very place”. The poem not only depicts the picturesque scenery of Mountain Lu and contains the dialectical idea that those closely involved in something cannot see it clearly, but also provides people with ways and means to observe things, giving the poem an enduring appeal. When we look at the past four million years of human evolution, the trajectory of humanity before they reach the pinnacles of achievements in economic, technological, cultural, and social dimensions today, we may find out there are three distinct eras. As is known to many, an economic era is not defined by what is produced, but by how and what kind of tools are used for production. As the production tools typical of an era vary, so does the capital an economy depends on for growth. We may roughly divide the economic development of humanity into three eras, characterized by hand tools and natural capital, by machine tools and production capital, and by intellectual tools and human capital, respectively. In the era of hand tools, agrarian and prior forms of society—which span from primitive, slave to feudal societies—relied mainly on natural capital. Natural capital provides natural means of living and production, and the multiplication of popula- tion is mainly reflected in the size of the workforce. Therefore, ancient and medieval civilizations appeared mostly in places with fertile land, abundant precipitation, mild climate, convenient land and water transportation, a dense population and large labor force. Cases in point are the five cradles of civilizations, namely, ancient Mesopotamia along the Tigris and Euphrates, ancient Egypt along the Nile Valley, ancient India along the Ganges River, ancient China along the Yellow River, and ancient Greece. The prosperity of the Seljuk Empire, the Russian Empire, and the French Empire in the Middle Ages could also be attributed to their superiority in natural capital and population