ANSWERS TO GEOGRAPHY: EUROPE AND CHINA^23
Now look at China, where "agriculture teems... and mankind
swarms."^6
Anyone who wants to understand world economic history must
study China, the most precocious and long the most successful devel
oper of all. Here is a country with some 7 percent of the earth's land
area that supports some 21 percent of the world's population. The old
Chinese slogan puts it succincdy: "The land is scarce and the people are
many."^7
Some two thousand years ago, perhaps 60 million people crowded
what was to become the northern edge of China—a huge number for
a small territory. This number more or less held over the next millen
nium, but then, from about the tenth to the beginning of the thir
teenth century, almost doubled, to around 120 million. At that point
came a setback, due largely to the pandemics also scourging Europe
and the Middle East; and then, from a trough of 65-80 million around
1400, the number of Chinese rose to 100-150 million in 1650,
200-250 million in 1750, over 300 million by the end of the eigh
teenth century, around 400 million in 1850, 650 million in 1950, and
today 1.2 billion, or more than one fifth of the world total. This ex
traordinary increase is the result of a long-standing (up to now) re
productive strategy: early, universal marriage and lots of children. That
takes food, and the food in turn takes people. Treadmill.
This strategy went back thousands of years, to when some peoples
at the eastern end of the Asian steppe exchanged nomadic pastoralism
for the higher yields of sedentary agriculture. From the beginning,
their chiefs saw the link between numbers, food, and power. Their po
litical wisdom may be inferred from ( 1 ) their mobilization of potential
cultivators, assigned to (planted in) potentially arable soil; (2) their
storage of grain to feed future armies; (3) their focus on food supply
to fixed administrative centers (as against camps). On these points, we
have "The Record of the Three Kingdoms," which tells of state war
fare around the year 200 of our era:
Ts'ao Ts'ao said: "It is by strong soldiers and a sufficiency of food that a
state is established. The men of Ch'in took possession of the empire by giv
ing urgent attention to farming. Hsiao-wu made use of military colonies to
bring order to the western regions. This is a good method used by former
generations." In this year he recruited commoners to farm state colonies
around Hsu [in central Honan] and obtained a million measures of grain.
Then he... marched out on campaign in every direction. There was no