Sprouts of capitalism

The sprouts of capitalism, seeds of capitalism or capitalist sprouts are features of the economy of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties (16th to 18th centuries) that mainland Chinese historians have seen as resembling developments in pre-industrial Europe, and as precursors of a hypothetical indigenous development of industrial capitalism. Korean nationalist historiography has also adopted the idea. In China the sprouts theory was denounced during the Cultural Revolution, but saw renewed interest after the economy began to grow rapidly in the 1980s.

Origins of the idea

The Chinese term was first used in the first chapter, "Chinese Society", of The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party, edited by Mao Zedong in 1939:

As China's feudal society had developed a commodity economy, and so carried within itself the seeds of capitalism, China would of herself have developed slowly into a capitalist society even without the impact of foreign capitalism.

Similar ideas had been explored by Chinese Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s, and provided a way of reconciling Chinese history with Karl Marx's five stages of modes of production: primitive, slavery, feudal, capitalist and socialist.

Shang Yue and other Chinese historians sought to justify Mao's hypothesis in the 1950s, producing a series of papers collected in two volumes entitled Essays on the debate on the sprouts of capitalism in China published in 1957 and 1960.

They identified a number of developments in the Chinese economy between the 16th and 18th centuries, including improved farming and handicraft technologies, improvement and expansion of markets, and changes in wage labor relationships.

These developments were compared to earlier changes in European economies, and held to constitute a new proto-capitalist phase of Chinese economic history.

Some versions of the theory held that indigenous development of industrial capitalism was forestalled by the 17th-century Manchu invasion or 19th-century conflicts with European powers such as the Opium War,

while others believed that the sprouts were always weak and had withered by the 19th century.

Later history of the idea

These ideas were also explored by Japanese historians of China in the 1950s, though they concluded that a decisive transformation was unlikely.