Dr. Chicheng Ma (Faculty of Business and Economics, HKU)

This paper examines how intellectual culture affects modern economic growth.  The research context is historical China, where the learned class had been entrenched in the worship for classical wisdom for millennia before being introduced to Western industrialization in the mid-19th century.  Drawing upon data across 269 prefectures, I document a reversal of (intellectual) fortune. In regions with more canonical scholars in the ancient time, local elite built more temples to worship their classical idols, fostering a stronger classicism in the intellectual circle. The classicism stifled the diffusion of modern knowledge and human capital and, consequently, inhibited industrial development in 1858 to 1927. In contrast, industrialization achieved sustained progress in regions without such holy scholastic history.  The findings illuminate the importance of the ‘cultural entrepreneurship’, or the lack thereof, in shaping modern economic growth.