Macro-Historical Parallelism and the China “Puzzle”

China’s rapid development in recent years has puzzled notonly the world but also the Chinese themselves. Growth on such a massive scale and at such an astonishing speed might seem miraculous and incomprehensible to many. Confronting the ‘puzzle’, it could bemeaningful for us to notice the fact that between China’s sinking to its nadir toward the end of the 19th century and its unmistakablerejuvenation after 1949, there was a lapse of only about fifty years. This is a very short time indeed in macro-historical terms. Or we could adopt a different way of periodizing, putting this period of time between the Opium Wars of the 1840s, when China was defeated by Britain and signed unequal treaties with the Western powers, and the 1990s, when China’s economy began decidedly to take off. In the latter case, a lapse of one hundred and fifty years is still a very short time macro-historically.