Commodity and Market 43
in particular is described by Leonard Blussé as the “Chinese Century”
in the South China Sea region.^150 Running parallel to this was the entry
of European players, resulting in direct trade between the region and
Western Europe. However, in the βirst 250 years, the Europeans only
managed to hold on to their gains as one of the many players in the local
trading networks.
The Peaking of the Chinese Junk Trade
The Economic Propellant for the Chinese Junk Trade
The upsurge in the Chinese junk trade from the sixteenth century was
propelled by the immense development of regional markets, cash crops
and the handicraft industry in China. In turn these factors ushered in what
was seen as “the Second Commercial Revolution”,^151 or what the mainland
Chinese scholars in the 1950s and the 1960s called “the budding of
capitalism”. As a matter of course, these developments contributed to the
stimulation of the commodity economy.^152 The commercialized economy
reached its height at the end of the eighteenth century.^153 William T. Rowe
cites the China scholar, Wu Chengming, saying that, “as of about 1800
roughly 10.5 per cent of the empire’s total grain production was marketed
each year, along with some 26.3 per cent of raw cotton output, 52.8 per
cent of cotton cloth production (over three billion bolts per year), 92.2
per cent of raw silk production, and nearly all of the very large tea and
salt output”. Rowe comments, “... what Wu described is a domestic market
of enormous scale, and a strikingly high degree of commercialization of
the Qing economy, prior to its enforced ‘opening’ by Western commercial
entrepreneurs”.^154
- Leonard Blussé, “Chinese Century: The Eighteenth Century in the China Sea
Region”, Archipel 58 (1999): 107–29. - The βirst “commercial revolution” occurred during Song times between the
eleventh and thirteenth centuries that saw “the βirst qualitative transformation
of the Chinese economy”. See William T. Rowe, “Domestic Interregional Trade in
Eighteenth-century China”, in On the Eighteenth Century as a Category of Asian
History, ed. Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra, p. 175. - Wang The-chien 王業鍵, “Ming-Qing jingji fazhan bing lun zibenzhuyi mengya
wenti”, 明清經濟發展並論資本主義萌芽問題 [The economic development
during the Ming-Qing periods and the question of the budding of capitalism], in
Qingdai jingji shi lunwen ji, 1 清代經濟史論文集（一）[A collection of papers
on economic history, Vol. 1] (Taipei: Dao Xiang chubanshe, 2003), p. 17. - Ibid., p. 17.
- William T. Rowe, “Domestic Interregional Trade in Eighteenth-century China”,
p. 179.