From the 1860s onwards, the most dynamic areas in the Chinese economy were Shanghai and
Manchuria.
Shanghai rose to prominence because of its location at the mouth of a huge system of waterways.
“The total of inland waterways navigable by junks in nearly all seasons is nearly 30 000 miles. To this
must be added an estimated half million miles of canalised or artificial waterways in the delta area. It
is not surprising therefore that between 1865 and 1936, Shanghai handled 45 to 65 per cent of China’s
foreign trade” (Eckstein, Galenson and Liu (1968, pp. 60–61). It was already an important coastal port
in the Ch’ing dynasty with a population of 230 000 in the 1840s. By 1938 this had risen to 3.6 million
and Shanghai was the biggest city in China (see Cooke Johnson, 1993, p. 180 and Perkins, 1969,
p. 293).
Manchuria had been closed to Chinese settlement by the Manchu dynasty until the 1860s. The
population rose from about 4.5 million in 1872–73 to 38.4 million in 1940; in the Japanese puppet
state of Manchukuo there were 48.8 million in 1941 (including Jehol as well as the three Manchurian
provinces). The Manchurian cultivated area rose from l.7 million hectares in 1872 to 15.3 million in
1940, i.e. from about 2 per cent to 15 per cent of the Chinese total. However, agriculture, forestry and
fishery represented only about a third of Manchurian GDP in 1941. There was very substantial railway
development, initially by Russia, then by Japan. Japan made major investments in Manchurian coal
and metalliferous mining and in manufacturing in the 1930s. Value added in modern manufacturing
more than quadrupled between 1929 and 1941; in mining it trebled. For 1933, Liu and Yeh (1965, p.
428), estimated that Manchukuo produced about 14 per cent of Chinese factory output. By 1941 this
was likely to have risen to a third and by 1945 may well have been a half of modern manufacturing.
GDP growth averaged 3.9 per cent a year from 1929 to 1941 and per capita GDP about 1.8 per cent
(see Chao, 1982).
In 1940 there were 820 000 Japanese civilians in Manchukuo. By 1945 there were more than a
million. This group consisted mainly of bureaucrats, technicians and administrative, managerial and
supervisory personnel. Only 10 per cent were in agriculture, about 45 per cent in industry, commerce
and transport and 26 per cent in public service. They were a privileged elite in a total population which
was 85 per cent Chinese, 6 per cent Manchu, 3 per cent Korean and 2.5 per cent Mongol (Taeuber, 1958).
In 1945–46, during the Soviet occupation, the USSR dismantled most of the moveable equipment
in Manchurian factories and shipped it back to Russia. Nevertheless, Manchuria remained an important
industrial base in the communist period.
其实最近的电影 le sang de tempelier就是有些影射那个历史,或许也可以说,光荣革命并不是一个invention,只是英国历史的又一个重演。
虽然没有具体的对比,但是,也许这里面可以一直从罗马入侵英伦,征服者查理征服英伦中都找到相似。都是来自大陆的根本不占优势的先进统治者,借着当地部分土著的默默支持而获取政权的。