Economic evolution in China

What is it about?

Economic evolution is considered as being driven by innovation of research and development (R&D) even if regional characteristics usually have critical impacts on various culture-oriented living styles that change in a social transformation dynamically. In documented Chinese history, climate changes and geographic conditions are constraints of the economic evolution in ecologically fragile regions. Lots of unpublished indigenous knowledge of environmental adaptation as a part of culture have been excluded from innovative records. In this research, we review research records of several key factors closely associated with economic evolution in the history of study regions, including climate change, cultural transition, economic base, resource endowment, and transportation accessibility. By surveying previous research records and contents, we examine the paths of economic evolution mixed with adaptive cultures response to climate change in each region, and draw conclusions that (1) the economic evolution with regional climate changes interactively experience three stages of culture-hindered, culture-mixed, and culture-impelled adaptation diversely; (2) regions that have higher economic performance with less innovative records highly likely have a relatively large number of indigenous knowledge unpublished throughout cultural evolution; and (3) English world has research preference to the regions where have lower economic performance with a distinctive culture in China.

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Why is it important?

The theory of economic evolution has argued that the endogenous innovation drives economic growth whether or not with a consideration of Location Theory (North, 1955; Solow, 1956, 1957; Arrow, 1962). From the perspective of endogenous innovation, philosophical explanations of economic evolution borrow some basic ideas from either Darwin’s natural selection or Lamarck’s biological evolution (Hodgson & Knudsen, 2006). In the process of economic evolution, it is debatable that innovations are spontaneous free wills or environmental adaptation for survival. Joseph Alois Schumpeter (1934) proposed that firms’ behaviors of the investment of the Research & Development (R&D) reflect the capability of innovations and entrepreneurships, indeed, which are endogenous engines to drive economic growth through a non-linear path back to a series of critical points in a dynamic equilibrium (Nelson & Winter, 1982). It indicates that R&D can also lead to inefficient investment (Hunt, 2006). Ahmed (1998) addressed that innovation is also a culture because people who are living in different region create various ‘innovation cultures and climates’. In those ecological fragile regions, innovation culture does not only have been distorting abstractive innovation climate but also have statistically significant impacts on natural climate and environmental change in the process of economic evolution (Adger et al., 2013; Leonard et al., 2013). Regional specific impacts of climate change drive global concerns when climatic condition and geographic information have been discussed increasingly to become more important to regional development than before. Location accessibility and transportation cost significantly influence on consumers’ choices, so that have inevitable impacts on regional agglomeration. Relatively scarcity of resource endowments and their uneven distribution reshape social networks in a stochastic process, so that to maximize firms’ profits or individuals’ utilities is not a divine guide of economic development. Theoretical studies have examined the path of economic growth in line with endogenous innovation; while, empirical analysis have argued that the effects of the initial level of economic base is also a determinate factor. Economic evolution has cultural preference. From the record counts in recent two hundred years on Google Scholar, we search the eight combinations of key word groups to examine economic evolution in each selected part of ecologically fragile regions of China. We find that the climate and culture are the main concerns; then the location ranked the second place; the environment and resource are placed in the third; the economic base is at fourth place; and the ruggedness is the lowest. These results match our assumptions that culture and climate are the most important to economic evolution in ecologically fragile regions in Chinese history. More interestingly, the number of research records in English which are supposed to symbolize endogenous innovation is not as much as the numbers of real economic performance in Chinese history. For instance, higher economic outputs on the Loess Plateau with lower research records in English on Google Scholar, while, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau has the lowest economic outputs with the most concerns from English world. By elaborating previous research about study regions, we find that there are three stages of cultural transition in economic evolution in ecologically fragile regions of China. The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and the Xinjiang region are culture-hindered adaptation to climate change in social transformation due to traditional religions and distinctive folk customs mainly. The Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau is culture-mixed adaptation because multi-ethnic groups coexist under diverse climates in micro-watersheds mainly. The Sichuan Basin is cultural-impelled adaptation to regional environmental change. There people migrate back and forth between mountainous and plain regions mainly for survival under variance of regional climate changes and the ruggedness of geographical conditions. The Loess Plateau has experienced culture-hindered and culture-mixed adaptation due to its important military location and long history of economic base. This forms a distinctive local culture which can self-impel technological innovation through advanced transportation induced multi-cultural communication. The cultural elements are the most important factor to the economic evolution on the Loess Plateau, which experiences all three stages of cultural transition under the limitations of climate changes and regional characteristics in social transformation. Thus, the real economic performance on the Loess Plateau is higher than the most of ecologically fragile regions in China even if research records in English are less than other regions on Google Scholar. The implication of this study is that the English world has different preferences from Chinese native researchers which lead to lower research records of the Loess Plateau on Google Scholar. Another explanation is that indigenous knowledge throughout cultural evolution have already solved some real problems and have been applied in daily living before those are documented and published. This argument needs to be figured out in reviews of historical documents of a specific region.

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