
Why the Twentieth Century Was Not a Chinese Century - gwern
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2013/08/where-was-china-why-the-twentieth-century-was-not-a-chinese-century-a-deleted-scene-from-my-slouching-towards-utopia-th.html
======
purplelobster
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.

~~~
noname123
Anytime nationalistic pride is stirred hard, it's hard to be not biased. So my
bias is pretty pro-Chinese and anti-West, so just to start off there.

>Chinese philosophy seems to me to be mostly about society and the duty of men

You are referring to Confucius and also perhaps the highly hierarchical nature
of the Chinese community party. Chinese philosophy in general is a mix of
Taoism, Buddhism and Confuciusm
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinegar_tasters](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinegar_tasters))
with conflicting tenets that respectively focuses on individual conduct, moral
values and social harmony. In general, Western media focuses on the governance
of the Communist party; that’s analogous to reduce Western philosophy down to
Locke and Mills and ignoring Heidegger, Nietzsche and Rousseau that is
concerned more with the individual development than the social
contract/utility. Note that a lot of Westerners also attempt to find spiritual
alternative in Zen Buddhism which is of Chinese origin.

>While Europe was worse off early on, it allowed the region to discover math
and science and make use of it.

I’d argue that the reason for the lack of a Chinese industrial revolution is
not because any inherent “thought” deficit but due to the Empire’s decision to
employ a Closed Door Policy and Sea Ban
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haijin)).
Compare China during the Sea Ban and Japan’s Meiji Restoration at the time or
even more recent economic development of South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan
(all of which are very Confucian) as an argument against any culture having an
monopoly on innovation. Unfortunately, at the time the traditional Chinese
culture is very inward looking and arrogant toward foreign thought because we
thought we were the best. But anytime you become close-minded and think that
you are the best in the world, you close yourself to alternative ideas beyond
your borders and will inevitably decline. Thankfully, we’ve learned this
lesson in the 20th century.

>China had a big fleet, but cancelled the project … China invented gun powder,
but they didn't use it to gain a military advantage.

Colonial conquest of foreign cultures is a very Western concept. Note that
China at one time had the most population and military power and built a great
wall at the Northern boundary; because China is more interested in governing
from the within. Even with Sinosphere neighbors at the time that were heavily
influenced by Chinese culture, Emperors were happier to have tributary states
than conquering the neighboring countries.

>Traditional Chinese Medicine used penicillin indirectly, but never managed to
understand or extract it.

That’s an implicit value judgment that Western medicine that focuses on
pharmacodynamics and pharmakinetics is superior than the holistic take of
Chinese medicine. Again note the Western movement to seek out holistic
medicine and more importantly, major Western pharmaceutical companies push for
personal genomics treatment
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_genomics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_genomics))
which takes into account the patient’s individual genetic variation. This is
not an attempt to conflate Chinese medicine with 23andme, but rather the
perspective that modern medicine is constantly evolving - from the discrete
scientific method of breaking down chemicals to their individual interactions
to a systematic view of complex metabolic pathways and cascade signaling
networks, which echoes the Chinese medicine’s idea of feedback cycle of Qi.

~~~
DougWebb
_But anytime you become close-minded and think that you are the best in the
world, you close yourself to alternative ideas beyond your borders and will
inevitably decline._

I kind of have the feeling that's been going on here in the USA since WWII.
The 40s gave us a really good reason to be arrogant about our own superiority
in the 50s and into the 60s, but since the 70s things have been going downhill
and no amount of "USA! USA!" chanting seems to help.

 _> Traditional Chinese Medicine used penicillin indirectly, but never managed
to understand or extract it.

That’s an implicit value judgment that Western medicine that focuses on
pharmacodynamics and pharmakinetics is superior than the holistic take of
Chinese medicine._

My take on Chinese medicine, and this goes for a lot of non-western 'science',
is that it's based on very-long-term observation of cause and effect, with
untestable/untested theories to explain 'why' the cause causes the effect. In
contrast, western science is much more focused on breaking down causes and
effects into very small pieces and doing repeatable experiments to discover
'why' in ways that can be applied more generally.

For example, acupuncture: Chinese doctors learned through observation that if
you stick a bunch of needles along this line, and give them a little tweak,
it'll help that organ over there to function better. "Why?" "Well, there's
this energy you can't see flowing though you, and the needles make it flow
better." "Oh, neat." As long as the explanation is internally consistent with
the observation, the theory is sufficient. It just can't be used to accurately
predict new causes and effects that haven't been observed yet.

The big drawback to the western approach is that by focusing on the details,
it looses the holistic overview, and we wind up with drugs that help one
particular health issue while causing a bunch of other health issues.
Thankfully, as you mentioned, western medicine is moving back towards the
holistic viewpoint, but now it's based on fundamental understanding of the
individual biologic processes unlike traditional Chinese medicine. Best of
both worlds, I think.

~~~
atlanticus
>But anytime you become close-minded and think that you are the best in the
world, you close yourself to alternative ideas beyond your borders and will
inevitably decline.

While it is easy to get up votes claiming America is like this the fact is we
get the best and brightest to such an extent that other countries have to work
very hard ro keep their smartest people.

~~~
DougWebb
It's also a fact that our country is collapsing in on itself. We're still on
top in a lot of ways, but the trend is definitely downwards in too many ways.
We'd hardly be the first "empire in decline", and like many we can probably
last decades or centuries without becoming completely historical and
overshadowed by the next great empire. So I guess it's not all bad.

Honestly, if someone else can take over the "World Police Force" job so we can
stop with the insane military spending, we could probably start taking care of
our debt and getting our economy into reasonable shape again.

------
graycat
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.

~~~
mtts
Not a bad guess. The literacy rate at the end of the Chinese civil war (1949)
was only about 11% or so. That can't possibly have been good.

------
mtts
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.

------
Theodores
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](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.

------
padobson
"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.

~~~
akgerber
Where's the irony? Cleveland in 1900 was a hugely wealthy city with a rapidly
growing population and innovative industries, near the forefront of
technologies like electric railroading, automobiles, and aviation. It's fallen
from prominence, as has Manchester, but it had a good run in its day, not
unlike Silicon Valley.

~~~
padobson
I thought there was a chance the author was being mildly ironic, but don't get
me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the Forest City, both in its history and its
current iteration of commerce, culture, and identity.

I just thought it was flattering that my favorite city, being less than 250
years old with claim to no world-moving historical events, should occupy the
same list as Baghdad, London, New York, and Washington in terms of historical
and cultural significance.

------
caoxuwen
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")

~~~
contravert
I just finished reading this book, and I found it extremely insightful. The
overview of Western and Eastern history from paleolitic to the modern era
really puts the entire question of West vs. East into a grander perspective.

However, the biggest twist and conclusion in the book comes from projecting
the trends of social development into the future. Ultimately, this question
will not matter as we march towards singularity or apocalypse at a
frighteningly fast pace.

------
HowardMei
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.

~~~
padobson
Net Neutrality, Copyrights, Patents, sensible immigration laws, friendliness
to entrepreneurship.

No. We're screwed too.

~~~
padobson
I may have not been clear that I think the US is failing badly at handling all
of those things, and it will cost us in the long run.

If what I was saying was clear, and you still disagree, then by all means
down-vote it.

------
beloch
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.

------
danmaz74
As it often happens, when you try too hard to make your point, you get carried
away.

~~~
LiweiZ
Perhaps there are just many dimensions to observe one object/thing. And most
of time, people are just not able to figure out the single point(if it does
exist and can be achieved with the given conditions) that can make sense for
all the dimensions.

~~~
danmaz74
We strive for simple explanation - as the OP says, the "root cause" \- but
there can't be a simple explanation for such big phenomena, encompassing
hundreds of years and hundreds of millions of people.

~~~
mildtrepidation
I think it's worth noting that there certainly _can_ be simple explanations
for big phenomena, even those within human cultures (the concept of currency
as a trading medium being a fairly simple idea that has spawned uncountable
and unfathomably complex, ever-evolving results). I would agree that the topic
here, though, is one that's unlikely to be traced to just one or two such
elementary concepts.

~~~
danmaz74
As you wrote, even an apparently simple idea like currency is actually
incredibly complicated in its historical reality, so complicated that there
are thousands of books about it, very active research, and competing school of
thoughts that propose completely different and incompatible theories about
what are the "causes" and what are the "effects".

So, my opinion is that every simple explanation of any big phenomena regarding
human history actually explains very little.

------
angersock
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.

------
bane
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.

------
AsymetricCom
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?

