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ABSTRACT
This paper studies the trade of China in the past 150 years, starting from the first opening of China
after the Opium War. The main purpose of the paper is to identify what is (and was) China’s ‘normal’
level of foreign trade, and how these levels changed under different trade regimes, from 1840 to the
present. We present new evidence on China’s foreign trade during the treaty port era (1842-1948),
drawn from disaggregated trade data collected by the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, that yields
important findings for current research. First, although the volume of foreign trade remained limited
initially, there was a notable expansion in the diversity of products, with many new goods being imported
into China. Second, the regional diffusion of foreign goods through China was greatly facilitated by
the expansions of the port system. Third, the importance of Hong Kong as an intermediary in China’s
trade has undergone long-term fluctuations suggestive of learning effects. China’s recent wave of liberalization
has led by the early 1990s to a trade level comparable to the high of the 1920s. While much of China’s
recent growth in world trade is in line with her income growth, there is no doubt that China’s trade
openness today, comparable by some measures to Denmark’s, is a stunning reversal relative to the
pre-1978 and also the pre-1840 period. The paper emphasizes the roles that history and institutional
change have played in this.
Wolfgang Keller
Department of Economics
Fisher Hall
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
and University of Colorado
and also NBER
Wolfgang.Keller@colorado.edu
Ben Li
Department of Economics
University of Colorado at Boulder
256 UCB, Boulder, CO, 80309
benli36@gmail.com
Carol H. Shiue
Department of Economics
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
and University of Colorado
and also NBER
carol.shiue@colorado.edu
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