China is the largest developing country in the world, and yet
internationally comparable data about her economy is very scarce, to the
detriment of our knowledge both of China and the Third World as a whole.
This thesis attempts to piece together a crucial statistic, her terms of
trade, from the 1930's when the last major Chinese series ends to the
1970's when CIA estimates become available. Because of the lack of
Chinese data, the thesis constructs core unit value indexes for Sino-
British trade from British returns,and subsequently adjusts the com¬
ponent weights to allow for the difference in composition between China's
trade with Britain and her trade with the West. This necessitates the
development of a specific methodology and the meticulous construction of
the Sino-British indexes at a high level of disaggregation. Chapter One examines the available statistics and explains the
strategy of using British data. Some of the problems of defining Sino-
British trade, especially undeclared indirect trade via Hong Kong, are
examined in Chapter Two, while Chapter Three describes the methodology
and documents the structure of the sample (which incorporates some 600
commodities). Chapters Four and Five describe the intellectual and
historical contexts in which the study is located. Chapters Six and
Seven construct the core indexes, Chapter Eight examines the weighting
modes used, Chapter Nine focuses on the 1930's and links the British
indexes with the Chinese ones. Chapter Ten analyses the price movement
of the components of Sino-British trade over the period and Chapter
Eleven arrives at an estimate of China's terms of trade with the West
and links up with the 1970's statistics, thus completing China's long-term
terms of trade from 1867 to 1976. The investigation is extensively
documented with some 1,000 pages of tables and figures
