The Confucian Clan as a Risk-Sharing Institution: How Pre-Industrial China Became the Most Populous Nation

This paper applies a new perspective to reassess the economics of Confucianism—risk mitigation, rather than productivity as emphasized in the literature. As a conservative philosophy of life, Confucianism prioritized stability over productivity, forming tightly-knit clans with supportive norms to make intra-clan resource pooling and risk sharing credible. Such efforts effectively expanded the Malthusian limits to population growth in preindustrial China, even in the absence of productivity gains. Using historical data from 269 prefectures for the 976–1851 period, we find that prefectures with stronger Confucian clans had significantly higher population density because of clan-enhanced resilience during natural disasters.