The latter half of the nineteenth century to the second decade of the twenty-first century for China were turbulent decades of crises and wars, economic growth and contraction, and finally an extraordinary few decades of transformation of the economy and society. The calamities of the mid-nineteenth century brought a new reckoning about China's future that set the country on the long road to modern economic development. External defeat and internal insurrection had bloodied the Qing dynasty. Britain's victory in the Second Opium War had disposed of the belief that the foreigners had got lucky in the First Opium War less than two decades earlier. British military technology was superior to anything China had, while the domestic rebellions had laid waste large parts of the China heartland, robbed the administration of vital revenue, and exposed the inadequacies of the state to maintain internal security. Confronted with these near-death experiences, prominent court and provincial leaders initiated a modernization programme, despite opposition from conservative officials and outright hostility from most of the Confucian elite.

China's “long” twentieth century, the focus of this chapter, began with these “self-strengthening” (ziqiang) modernization initiatives in the 1860s and 1870s. New state institutions were created and the state sponsored arsenals and firms in shipping, textiles and mining. These fared little better than Japan's state-sponsored firms around the same time. In hindsight, the steps were too small, too few and too limited in scope. Their failings were exposed in the crushing defeat a modernizing Japan dealt China in 1894. The treaty that concluded the brief war with Japan allowed foreigners to establish manufacturing enterprises in China. Between 1895 and 1937, foreign capital and the private sector drove Chinese economic development. Shanghai and a few other places became vibrant centres of modern industry, commerce and urban culture. That economic growth was snuffed out in 1937 when Japan launched a full-scale invasion.

China during 1937–45 was characterized by multiple economies: the Japanese controlled the cities of east and central China, the Nationalists controlled southwest and west China, and in the interstices of the rural spaces between and the remote northwest provinces, the Communists held sway.