I just finished listening to The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
The big question of why China stagnated while Europe was booming with the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution was not definitively addressed by Needham or Winchester and the scholars that he cites, but Winchester points out that when historians look back from the year 3000 A.D. it may not be very interesting that China had a slow period from 1650-1980 (roughly the years of the Qing Dynasty and Mao).
[The mammoth size and cost of the Cambridge University Press volumes shows the power of the Web and the comparative ineffectiveness of print. Needham was not able to work very effectively with collaborators; most of the real experts in this field were on the other side of the globe from his rooms in Cambridge (England). At $150-350 per volume, not too many folks are going to buy a set for their living room. It would have been very interesting to see what a guy like Needham could have done with a distributed army of 500 scholars rather than just a handful of assistants.]
Do you know any texts that more definitively address the “big question” you speak of?
Needham on scientific law v social and the very idea of lawfulness is wonderful and accessible even to folks with low tolerance for hard science. Apologies, I don’t have a specific page or volume number at hand, though.
Gary: I’m sorry that I can’t give you references. The hardcopy book probably has some and certainly the names of at least three scholars who addressed this question, but I listened to the book in my car and didn’t take notes while driving! (That would be a new high water mark for distracted driving: taking notes on an audio book and then sending them out via SMS.)
jared diamond talks about the chinese stagnancy a little bit in guns, germs, and steel. if you get a recent version of the book he covers it in more detail in the afterword.
he blames it largely on unified rule, iirc–many warring fiefdoms would rise and fall with technological advances while a single long-term government can quash innovation on a whim.
1. stealing of Tea monopoly by Britain.
2. devaluing their currency.
3. taking their raw material and finishing it in West and
selling it back to them.
4. Selling them Opium to get back all the silver.
5. Opium War
6. Divide Rule instituted by West
7. Making them lease their own territory.
8. Stealing their technology and knowledge,
yet not sharing your own.
9.
I am sure a chinese can come with more than
what I have done in five minutes.
“Needham never fully worked out why China’s inventiveness dried up. Other academics have made their own suggestions: the stultifying pursuit of bureaucratic rank in the Middle Kingdom and the absence of a mercantile class to foster competition and self-improvement; the sheer size of China compared with the smaller states of Europe whose fierce rivalries fostered technological competition; its totalitarianism.”
From this Economist.com subscriber-only article…
http://www.economist.com/culture/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11496751
Nahin: The problem with your “blame everything on the West” theory is that it requires China already to have been technologically backward prior to significant contact with the West. Yet just a few centuries earlier, China was technologically far ahead of the West. Why was there an Industrial Revolution in the West, but not in China? It was the Industrial Revolution that led to the West’s power, not vice versa.
Mark: Needham does cite one scholar who says that Chinese culture resulted in smart young people aspiring to government jobs and that is ultimately what killed innovation. I guess we are doing that experiment here in the U.S. right now!
– because the balance of payment was in favor of China.
– They didn’t need to invent anything new because
their war period was over.
– because China didn’t have Oil.
– because chinese merchants didn’t need to create Corporations
to finance trade with the East.
Industrial revolution was invented in 1860s. Long after
cotton, sugar, black pepper, tea, everything else was
already stolen. British mills could not work without raw material
like Cotton and Silk. Cotton gin was re-invention of an Indian
that was in use for hundreds of years.
Coal was needed by Britain because they had used all the wood in
the country. Every major invention was about War.
If you didn’t know Cotton, Sugar and Black pepper was an
Indian monopoly. not the chinese, arabs, greeks, romans, egyptians stole it.
We shall see when the Oil runs out what happens to West’s power.
It will be an illusion once again.
I can go on but I think you don’t like inconvenient facts like
WWI was about Oil. Even simple history cannot be taught with straight face.
because the chinese didn’t have philosophy that
nature is evil and needs to be tamed.
the other has to be demonized and killed.
The quote bellow is taken from BBC History magazine
the article was about 100 objects in history.
I would paste a link but this would get flagged as spam.
Battle with the Centaurs panel from the Acropolis,
Athens, Greece around 440 BC
“One week of the series will be devotes to societies in
the age of Confucius. We’ll be looking at how China
develops the idea that you can construct a society that
will cohere and defend itself on the basis of harmony;
how the Persian empire constructs its notions of cohesion
and defense, which is by absorbing all the different cultures;
and then how Athens does it.
One of the defining notions of Athenian cultures is its focus
on ‘the other’; that you Athenians/Greeks are not like the
people you are fighting – they are different. Neither the Chinese
nor the Persians do that. And our choice of battle with the
Centaurs against the Greeks was the defining example of this
notion on the Parthenon in Athens, where the enemies are not
quite human. That’s the defining moment when Europe constructs
the Middle East as the bestial other. You’ve got three contemporary
but utterly different notions of how you hold a society together.”
Nahin: Regarding your assertion that the West did not begin to industrialize until the 1860s… Francis Bacon, credited with establishing the scientific method, was born in 1561. Newton and Leibniz were publishing their works in mathematics and physics in the 1680s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_revolution says that the industrial revolution, the natural development of the advances in science, is generally considered to have begun in 1760-1780. By the end of the 1860s, the U.S. was connected by a 3000-mile transcontinental railroad.
You’ve also singled out oil as somehow important. The British Navy was one of the earliest adopters of oil as a fuel. They converted their ships from coal to oil in the 20th century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_petroleum says that the first commercial oil well was drilled in 1853, long after the scientific and industrial revolutions in the West were complete.
Mark, philg: I think that the aspiration to government jobs argument is an interesting theory. It sounds like a perverted incentive system, which makes me feel as though the probability of that argument being correct is quite high. We’ll see what happens in the US, with so many of the brightest going into finance. Thanks for the thoughts.
David S. Landes, in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, argued that the supreme power of the Chinese state, and the comparative lack of political power of the ordinary citizen, meant that entrepreneurs could not rely on gaining any benefit from exploiting their inventions, and thus they remained unexploited. Everything was done at the whim of the state. At one point an enormous exploration fleet was built, but then scrapped when the emperor decided against exploring the outside world.
Not as attractive as blaming it all on the West, granted, but then inconvenient facts seldom are!