重访“大分流”:澄清中西历史和现实中两大不同农业演变模式

Revisiting“the Great Divergence”:Clarifying the Two Major Different Modes of Agricultural Evolution in Chinese and Western History and Reality

彭慕兰(Kenneth Pomeranz)和李伯重最近承认,自己过去坚持中国和西方经济的“大分流”要到1800年之后方才出现是错误的,但他们仍然坚持,在农业和农业劳动生产率方面自己原来的论点是正确的。18世纪以来英格兰的农牧结合模式和中国的单一种植模式有着根本性不同,掌握两者的差异才能认识到两国过去和未来发展出路的不同。坚持两者的相同和相等性只可能继续导致错误的认识和抉择。中国农业(和其政治经济总体)所走的历史、近现代和当代的实际道路都不可能与西方一样。直面两者间基本不同的实际,才可能真正认识到符合中国如今和未来所需要的发展出路。

Kenneth Pomeranz and Li Bozhong have recently conceded that they had been wrong that“the great divergence”between China and the West occurred only after 1800,but they continue to insist that when it came to agriculture and its labor productivity,their earlier argument still holds.There are fundamental differences between eighteenthcentury England’s crops cum animal husbandry agriculture and China’s cropsonly agriculture.It is time we recognize fully how very different the two were and are,and how and why each follows an entirely different pattern to modern development.It is simply wrong to continue to obscure those basic differences by insisting on equivalence between them.