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Great Divergence

Li Bozhong

Chinese economic historian (b. 1949), professor at Tsinghua University and previously at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Trained at the Chinese Academy. The principal Chinese-language scholar of the late-imperial Yangzi-delta economy and the empirical bedrock of much California-school comparative work — particularly Pomeranz’s case for Yangzi-vs-England parity in 1750.

Intellectual program

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Li’s career-long contribution has been the detailed reconstruction of agricultural productivity, commercial activity, household economy, demography, and proto-industrial production in the Lower Yangzi (Jiangnan) across the late Ming and Qing. Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620–1850 (1998, in English) is the foundational quantitative reconstruction; subsequent work in Chinese (and partially in English) has extended the program to Jiangnan handicraft production, urban-rural relations, and household labour allocation.

The methodological commitment is rigorous-quantitative-empirical. Li’s reconstructions draw on local Chinese archival sources — provincial administrative records, lineage genealogies, commercial-firm records, agricultural treatises — that few Western scholars have engaged with at comparable depth. The empirical findings have been consequential: Li’s Jiangnan agricultural-productivity numbers are part of what supports Pomeranz’s parity claim; his demographic and household-economy work bears on Elvin’s high-level equilibrium trap framework; his data on female and child labour participation in Jiangnan textile production cuts across multiple modern debates.

Li’s later work has engaged the Broadberry-Guan-Li revisionist GDP project — he is a co-author with Stephen Broadberry and Hanhui Guan on the 2018 Journal of Economic History paper that supplies much of the empirical case against the strong-form California-school parity claim. The intellectual position this puts Li in is interesting: his earlier Jiangnan-empirical work supplied the data for Pomeranz’s parity case, and his later collaborative work has been part of the revisionist challenge to that case.

Reception

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Li is the most-cited modern Chinese-language economic historian in Western GD-debate scholarship. His Jiangnan reconstructions are treated as the empirical reference for late-imperial Yangzi economic history, and his Broadberry collaboration has made him a central figure in the parity-vs-revisionist meta-debate rather than a partisan of either side.

Associated positions

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Key works

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  • Agricultural Development in Jiangnan, 1620–1850 (1998, Macmillan / St. Martin’s; English-language).
  • Numerous Chinese-language monographs on Jiangnan handicraft industry, household economy, and Qing-era technological change (a substantial literature, much of it not yet translated into English).
  • With Stephen Broadberry and Hanhui Guan: “China, Europe, and the Great Divergence: A Study in Historical National Accounting, 980–1850” (Journal of Economic History, 2018).
  • With Jan Luiten van Zanden: “Before the Great Divergence? Comparing the Yangzi Delta and the Netherlands at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century” (Journal of Economic History, 2012).