The Kuznetsian paradigm for the study of China’s economic history

This chapter tackles the ongoing debate of the Great Divergence which involves economic data and parameters. Despite China’s super-long tradition of Confucian education, literacy rates, imperial bureaucracy and record-keeping, trustworthy data – be they community outputs and prices, cadastral surveys and population concusses – are in fact hard to obtain. This chapter testifies fundamental problems with China’s historical records that are incompatible with and unsuited for modern data compilation and analysis. Thus, it is difficult to compare China with Europe (or a region of China with a region of Europe) without huge margins of error.