Quantitative History of China: Historical Roots of Recent Success and Future Development

China's recent economic success and its development trajectory are among the most discussed stories of our time. To understand what drove these achievements, scholars have looked back at China's historical roots. Before the computer age, however, no scholar could handle hundreds of thousands, let alone millions, of historical documents/cases/observations. As a result, historians traditionally had to rely on selective case studies to construct qualitative narratives that are often important and insightful but difficult for systematic testing. Now, with numerous archives being digitised in China and beyond, scholars have no choice but to work with historical ‘big data', and the only feasible way to conduct big data-based historical inquiries is with quantitative methods.