Why the Twentieth Century Was Not a Chinese Century

I'm not an expert, but to me it seems that every recent account of west vs. east vastly overestimates how awesome China was, just for shock value. This article seems to claim that Europe didn't surpass China until the 1800s. Why then did math, astronomy and other sciences, and natural philosophy not originate in China, but centuries earlier in Europe (with a loose definition of "originate", I know Europeans were not the first)? Most of Chinese philosophy seems to me to be mostly about society and the duty of men etc. I'm sure China excelled at organizing an efficient society with a comparatively huge population, but that doesn't mean that they were on the cusp of something bigger. Perhaps they were at a local optimum as a society. And while Europe was worse off early on, it allowed the region to discover math and science AND make USE of it. China had a big fleet, but cancelled the project. China invented printing but it did not push literacy. China invented gun powder, but they didn't use it to gain a military advantage. Traditional Chinese Medicine used penicillin indirectly, but never managed to understand or extract it. China is a sea of lost opportunities, it's not as simple as blaming it on opium and intervening western powers.

edit: it seems that further down this article gives more explanations and actually states that China was in stagnation from 1200 onwards. However, there are many other articles and books making the argument I'm trying to refute. For me, the interesting part of the article is:

Perhaps the root problem was the absence of a new world rich in resources to exploit and helpless because of technological backwardness.

Perhaps the root problem was the lesser weight attached to instrumental rationality as a mode of thought

Perhaps the root problem was the absence of dissenting hidey-holes for ideological unconformity.

Perhaps the root problem was the fact that the merchants and hand-manufacturers of China's cities were governed by landlords appointed by the central government rather than governing themselves.

Perhaps the root problem was that large-muscled animals like oxen and horses turned out to be powerful productive multipliers for temperate rain-irrigated wheat-based agricultural but not for sub-tropical paddy-irrigated rice-based agriculture

Perhaps the root problem was some combination of these.

Perhaps the root problem was one or a combination of any of a host of other possibilities over which historians will struggle inconclusively (but thoughtfully and fruitfully) for the rest of time.

My guess: What screwed China was the Roman alphabet because China didn't use it. Then when the written word became important for the masses in the West and for progress in the West, China started falling behind.

The effect is still easy to see in Chinese culture, say, cooking: It's still strongly the case that Chinese cooking is essentially just not written down and, instead, is learned by apprenticeship. E.g., I have stacks of books on cooking -- US, French, Italian, German, and Chinese -- and far and away the worst written are the books on Chinese cooking. So, the books on American cooking I got from my family from, say, the 1930s, are very nicely done with times, temperatures, weights, and volumes, but the books on Chinese cooking have essentially no measurements at all. Then for explanations of the steps and details, again the Chinese books are far behind. Again, simply, Chinese cooking is so far nearly never actually written down in anything like what is common for thorough descriptions in countries that use the Roman alphabet.

Why the Roman alphabet? Because it's so darned easy to work with, and the Chinese little drawings severely throttle what that masses might do with reading and writing.

It's an interesting topic - but this article is wrong on so many factual counts it's probably not worth bothering with. Here's three of them:

> The British Empire acquired the then nearly barren island of Hong Kong as a base

Which was then, and had been for some time, a major trade center

> And one's [ an upwardly mobile enterpreneur's ] children could do the most important thing needed for upward mobility: study the Confucian classics and do well on the examinations: first the local shengyan, then the regional juren, and then the national jinshi.

Nope. Succeeding in the examinations meant having been brought up in them, which only aristocratic children were. Though the examination system seemed meritocratic from the outside, in reality it was anything but.

> Perhaps 10 million people, 3% of China's population, died [ during the Taiping rebellion]

Nope, more like 50 million

It's an interesting question why China suddenly fell behind the West after 1700 and this article touches on some of them - the Qing were definitely part of the problem - but it veers off course so often it pretty much becomes worthless.

A very interesting article. However it is sometimes possible to overlook the basics and over-theorise about things:

1) Having ~50% of the population forcibly disabled probably did not help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding

2) The importance of glass cannot be underestimated. Particularly when it comes to spectacles. It is something like two thirds of the population that wear glasses or contact lenses in the west. Being able to see is a prerequisite for so many things like being able to read. Being able to read is a prerequisite for so many things like being able to do science. Being able to do science is a prerequisite for an advanced civilisation.

Sure it took a while for glasses to be available to all, however, in the West it was feasibly possible to get glasses - not the case in China.

"A thousand years before—-in 800, say—-the technological and civilizational cutting edges of humanity were to be found in the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid’s capital of Baghdad and the Tang Dynasty Emperor Dezong’s Chang’an, rather than London or Bristol of Manchester or New York or Washington or Cleveland." (Emphasis mine)

As a North East Ohioan, I was shocked and flattered that we were mentioned, even if ironically. Cleveland rocks, indeed.

Edit: formatting.

There is a fantastic book - "Why the west rules, for now" that deals with this question (the name sounds quite right-wingish, but it's actually a great history book). I highly recommend anyone interested in this topic to read it.

If I can bring some interesting observations of the author to this discussion, it's that West (including mid east+europe+later america) and East (mostly China+later japan) led at different times. West had a 2000 year head start and reached its peak during Roman empire. East finally caught up around 600 AD and was ahead till the eve of western industrial revolution. Backwardness in some period of history (whether it's in nature resource, technology, social organization), became advantages in others. So you see the power shift constantly happening.

The ultimate reason (obviously i'm doing a huge reduction here) the writer claimed that caused the last shift of power between East and West was simply that America was too far from China. China got the thoughts/technology it needed. Europe found a flood of new problems and solved them with new thoughts/technology.

While I don't completely agree with his arguments, it's nonetheless an interesting and well supported point of view and much better than many other books out there that deals with big history topic (eg. "Guns, Germs and Steel")

LoL. There were exactly two political groups/parties to blame for the collapse of Northen Song dynasty and the following stagnation of everything in China.

They were Yuanyou(元佑党人) the reformists, and Yuanfeng(元丰党人) the conservatives.

Damn.

Now, there is a similar case in US.

I hope this time, politicians can do much better than ruin all good things.

A pertinent pair of novels (by a Westerner) are "Under Heaven" and "River of Stars" by Guy Gavriel Kay. While set in the author's usual "slightly alternate" history, they are effectively set in the Tang and Song dynasties respectively. I have no idea how the Chinese regard these novels, but the linked essay could have been written, in part, on these novels instead of actual history. The second book's central theme is the peril presented by an isolated ruling class, institutionalized military incompetence, and the lack of trust in military leaders. They're good reads if fiction is more your speed.

As it often happens, when you try too hard to make your point, you get carried away.

That was a delightful article--I do wish that more information and thinking was articulated about China during the 20th century.

Perhaps the thesis is that, by the mid 1800s, the race was lost.

Societies seem to want to organize themselves in a few different ways -- the most common is to organize for stability. It's understandable since everything from irregular weather to power struggles in leadership often lead to untimely and unpleasant deaths.

Massive social and technological revolutions were likely to be sources of misery for everybody.

Let's not forget that massive social and technological change was not common in the West either -- despite lots of smart folks, the Classical Greeks of 430BC weren't really all that behind the Romans of 220AD in terms of technology and these are widely considered among the smartest, most vigorous and most impressive of ancient Western Civilizations. The Russ, Germanic Tribes etc. pretty much had lived the same for thousands of years.

Organizing for stability creates stagnation, but in most cases this is perfectly normal. The kinds of fast change we've seen in the West post Middle-ages is pretty bizarre -- and has in many ways conformed to the idea I mentioned above. Some of the bloodiest and deadliest times in known history have all occurred since the start of the Renaissance.

For whatever reason; lots of competing non-unified territories, guns germs and steel, the black death, whatever; the West, starting in the late 15th century has managed to make fast massive social and technical change the norm.

In China, massive upheavals like this were usually a sign the empire was falling apart, or the Mongols were invading, or a dynasty was about to crumble. So every effort was made to stop these things from happening. Like I said, this is totally normal in human history. In fact, there are arguments that one of the reasons democracy is a viable option is that it largely resolves the painful succession problems in totalitarian/authoritarian systems -- it's a kind of social stabilizer. In India it was the caste system, in China it's probably attributable to Confucianism.

When Rome was starting to have ambitions of growing from a bunch of farmers into something larger, Confucius was out teaching rigid social order. But the Confucian revival in the Tang Dynasty during the start of the Dark Ages in the West is where it was really cemented in. It's also often called one of the most stable in Chinese history.

Another thing to note is that it's also very common, after a large social collapse, to look back at a previous golden age and to try and recapture it in some way. In the West this movement was called the Renaissance. You might say the post-Ottoman world is kind of "Dark Ages" for the central Asian Muslim world (you might notice that lots of the focus of groups like Al Qaeda and Al Shabaab is to recapture the former glory of the ancient Golden Age of the caliphates). A post Dark Age Renaissance in the Muslim world would be welcomed by many.

It might be argued that China is just now emerging from a kind of "Dark Age" that could be argued to have started with the end of the Song Dynasties into a Western Style period of rapid continuous revolution.

In the West we had the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, etc. China is going through something right now that's similar, what it'll be called is anybody's guess but history will have to wait for it to play out.

Sure you can have smart and advanced people, but how will you control them? Better to hire idiots you can control than to risk losing control to advancement?