China

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of landowners whose income depended on rents from their peasant tenants. Agricultural taxes levied by the imperial government and crop yields subject to drought and floods kept agriculture relatively underdeveloped and organized in small units with the use of primitive methods for basic subsistence.

The conclusion of the Opium War of 1840 formally initiated a period of Western penetration of China from the coastal treaty ports. Railroads and highways were constructed, and some industrial development began. Such activity had little impact, however, on the overall Chinese economy. In effect, China was carved up into a number of competing colonial spheres of influence. Japan, which tried to attach China to its East Asia prosperity Sphere, was able to create only isolated nodes of a modern economy.

The Chinese Communist party emerged in the 1920s in the midst of a mounting economic crisis caused by foreign intervention and increased landlord influence in the countryside. For ...

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in 1958, trying to get China ahead into industrialization. This program was characterized by large investments in heavy industry and the establishment of small-scale versions of such industries as steel refining. The program, however, caused great disruptions in economic management and in rational economic growth, and in 1960 the program had to be abandoned.

The Chinese economy then entered a period of readjustment, but by 1965 production in many fields again approached the level of the late 1950s. The third five-year plan began in 1966, but both agricultural and industrial production were severely curtailed by the effects of the Cultural Revolution; a fourth five-year plan was ...

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