Notes to pages 675–684 } 845
- Re parity purchasing power: rather than measuring the size of economies by taking
the total circulation of goods and services measured in a country’s own currency and com-
paring that economy to other economies by exchanging currencies at existing exchange
rates, parity purchasing power adjusts for differing costs of comparable goods in different
countries. In the United States, for example, higher education and medical care are very
expensive, while the same items in China are much cheaper. A basked of essential goods is
thus compared in terms of what they cost consumers in different countries, and the size of
the overall economy adjusted accordingly. Because so many items cost less in China than
in other countries, PPP makes China’s larger when compared to other high-price econo-
mies. Economists generally believe PPP gives a more accurate comparison of overall size. - Thomas G. Rawski, Economic Growth in Prewar China, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989, pp. 344–51. - “On Sino-US Trade Balance,” March 1997, Information Office of the State Council,
White Papers of the Chinese Government (2) (1996–1999), Beijing: Foreign Languages
Press, 2000, p. 217–18. - World Bank, World Development Indicators databank. http://www.databank.world-
bank.org/data/views/variableselection/selectvariables.aspx?. - World Development Indicators.
- John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, New York: W. W. Norton,
2001, p. 398. - In the mid-fifteenth century, the Europeans, led by Portugal’s Prince Henry the
Navigator, began the systematic design of ships of large cargo capacity that could navigate
safely and reliably on the high seas of the world’s oceans. Within a century or so, seaborne
trade in bulk cargos (sugar, tea, tobacco, fibers) began to tie together previously remote
regions of the globe. - Regarding the Silk Road, see Valerie Hanson, The Silk Road: A New History,
New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Frances Wood, The Silk Road, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2002. Susan Whitfield, Along the Silk Road, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999. Li Qingxin, Maritime Silk Road, Beijing: China Intercontinental
Press, 2006. Also, The Silk Road on Land and Sea, Beijing: China Pictorial, 1989. - G. F. Hudson, Europe and China; a Survey of their Relation from the Earliest Times
to 1800, Boston: Beacon, 1961; chapter 3, pp. 68–102, deals with the silk trade. - Regarding this early modern East Asian maritime trading system, see John E. Wills
Jr., “Maritime Asia, 1500–1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination,”
American Historical Review, vol. 98, no. 1 (1993), pp. 83–105. John E. Wills Jr., “Was There
a Vasco da Gama Epoch? Recent Historiography,” in Vasco da Gama and the Linking
of Europe and Asia, edited by Anthony Disney and Emily Booth, New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2000, pp. 350–60. Tonio Andrade, Lost Colony: The Untold Story of
China’s First Great Victory over the West, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. - Rawski, Economic Growth in Prewar China, p. 344.
- Chalmers Johnson, MITI and the Japanese Miracle: The Growth of Industrial Policy,
1925–1975, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982. - The general idea was that Japan cooperated with the US security system in Asia in
exchange for wide access to markets under US protection. - Singapore and Hong Kong were fully orientated to participate in global trade, thus
conforming to the standard East Asian practice, but lacked the strong state guidance of
markets characteristic of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.