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It seems that famines in China were commonplace even pre-19th century: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lis
by inglor_cz 1y ago
It seems that famines in China were commonplace even pre-19th century:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_famines_in_China
Political system may be one of the reasons (feudalism doesn't have a great record in preventing famines either), but the most salient explanation might be that a pre-modern economy with high density of population is inherently prone to famines - a bad drought will easily topple the precarious balance between demand and supply towards lack of food, and without a railway network it is nearly impossible to move food easily among places that don't have good ports.
- woooooo 1y agoFlooding on either of the two big rivers also caused mass casualties by wrecking the farming infrastructure.
- grafmax 1y agoI thought we were talking about the role of colonization in violence in China over the past 250 years. Most events you listed (Taiping rebellion, Boxer rebellion, CCP-KMT civil war) were the result of weakening of the Qing dynasty by foreign powers, its downfall, the chaos this produced during the Warlord era. The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution (again I’m not exonerating them) were themselves in large part reactions to the legacy of imperialism on China.