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| Balance of Payments Estimates in Chinese History: 1550-1948 |
| YAN Se, XIN Xing
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Guanghua School of Management, Peking University;
Executive Office, China Construction Bank |
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Abstract The balance of payments plays an important role when studying the internal economic process of an economy and is an important indicator for understanding the macroscopic situation of an economy. By analyzing China's balance of payments, we can better understand how China's social economy is related to the global market. The formation of the balance of payments requires two basic conditions. The first condition is large-scale economic exchanges at home and abroad. The second condition is a unified settlement medium.
In 1513, the Portuguese came to China for the first time to engage in trade, and they began to engage in normalized trade in China 20 or 30 years later (Li Longsheng, 2005). After the middle and late Ming dynasty, with the continuous development of social economy, silver settlement became more common. In view of this, combined with various trade statistics, we selected the starting time for the study of China's balance of payments as the twenty-ninth year of Jiajing in the Ming dynasty (1550). International trade is the foundation of the balance of payments. In different historical periods, China's international trade scale, trading partners, and trade policies have differed. These differences have affected China's balance of payments. Therefore, starting from 1550, this paper divides China's balance of payments into four historical stages based on the scale and characteristics of China's international trade in different periods. The first stage was from 1550 to the demise of the Ming dynasty in 1644. During this stage, China's trading partners included Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and other Western countries in addition to neighboring countries. Silver was widely used in international settlements during this period, and the scale of trade began to grow and gradually form a statistically valuable relationship with the balance of payments. The second stage was from the entry of the Qing army in 1644 to the outbreak of the first Opium War in 1840, when the government limited opening up to international trade, and the current account in the balance of payments expanded slowly. The third stage was from 1840 to the demise of the Qing dynasty in 1911. At this stage, China quickly integrated into the world economic system, and international trade expanded rapidly. In addition to trade in goods and services, international capital began to enter China on a large scale. The balance of payments was affected by not only the current account but also the capital and financial accounts. The fourth stage was from 1911 to 1949. On the one hand, the domestic financial industry, manufacturing, and other industries developed rapidly during the period of the Republic of China, and international economic and trade exchanges reached unprecedented heights. On the other hand, political turmoil and frequent wars, particularly the more than 10 years of war after 1937, had a serious impact on the national economy, and the balance of payments also showed the distinct characteristics of this period.
There have been some previous studies on China's balance of payments. In terms of statistics about the balance of payments, the research before 1840 was limited to the discussion of the flow of silver and seldom analyzed and discussed each item in the balance of payments. Since 1840, Chinese and foreign scholars have conducted a great deal of research on the balance of payments based on old customs data, modern foreign treaties, foreign debt contracts, and other materials. However, there are still several problems in the current research about China's balance of payments.
Compared with previous studies, this paper makes three main contributions:
First, through data mining, analysis, comparison, and estimation, the balance of payments data before 1890 and after 1936 were completed, spanning the period from the 29th year of Jiajing in the Ming dynasty (1550) to the night before the founding of New China in 1948. A complete and continuous balance of payments was established, advancing the beginning of the balance of payments by 340 years. Second, the unified balance of payments project framework and standards of the International Monetary Fund were adopted to achieve the dynamic comparability of the balance of payments over the 398-year time span. The factors of changes in expenditures were analyzed and researched, and the data on the balance of payments before 1948 can be unified with the data on the balance of payments after the founding of New China to the present. Third, we verified and corrected the important problems of predecessors in terms of the basic data, statistical caliber, and project classification, and further improved the accuracy of the basic data.
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Received: 07 October 2022
Published: 01 April 2023
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