| This dissertation investigates the micro-foundations behind the high population pressure on land in pre-industrialized China. It identifies several patterns of peasant demographic behaviors that had contributed to the phenomenon of high population pressure on land. Alongside with competitive market systems, including active factor markets at the village level, population pressure on limited land resources had been accumulating in rural communities generation after generation, long before industrialization and urbanization. While such accumulated population pressures might have pushed growth in gross output, yield, and even output per capita, it had also led to a unique mode of production in rural China, which was family-based, labor-intensive, and driven by inputting more quantity of labor in the long-run. Unless there were fundamental structural changes occurring outside the villages, which could generate enough economic opportunities to absorb rural laborers, a traditional urban economy would not be able to defeat the involutionary forces that kept generating population growth endogenously. |
