New Perspectives on China’s Late Imperial Period

Patrick Leung obtained his bachelor’s degree in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his doctoral degree in managerial economics from Harvard University. He is currently Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Economics of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

• List of Tables – List of Figures – Preface – Acknowledgments – Part One: Overview – When Did China Fall Behind? – Differences Between the Beliefs and Value Systems of the West and China – What Closed Door Policy? – Almost Everybody Disliked Merchants – Free Markets Without Capitalism? – Why Is the Chinese Population So Large? – Literacy Rates of Ming and Qing China – Why Hadn’t the Chinese Discovered the New World and Australia? – What Happened to Chinese Firearms? – Why China Had No Scientific and Industrial Revolution? – Rule of Law, Rule of Man and Rule by Law – Ruling Class Democracy versus Rule by Mandarins – Part Three: Why China Slept and Implications for the Future – China’s Long Sleep: Imperial Overstretch and Its Consequences – What If Europeans Had Not Come to China in the Early Modern Period? – Implications for China’s Resurgence – Index.

“Patrick Leung has produced an impressive, interdisciplinary examination of the myriad factors that contributed to China’s long period of relative economic backwardness. Drawing on such priors, he offers explanations for the country’s present resurgence and suggests some signposts for its future path of evolution. There are China economists. There are China historians. There are China philosophers. And there are China jurists. Very few China scholars are able to pull together the large body of Chinese and foreign language literature into such a readable and informative analysis.”— Dr Simon Ogus, CEO DSG Asia Limited