This is a mystery that defies explanation. In the 13th century, the Italian traveller Marco Polo visited China, and was amazed at how advanced the Chinese Empire was…the “Middle Kingdom” had mastered many technologies, of which the europeans were totally ignorant. for example, the Chinese were mining coal, printing paper (using moveable type), and manufacturing gunpowder. In addition, the empire had a professional civil service system, a nation-wide army, and a canal system that facilitated trade across the empire. There was a central bank, and paper money was in use. The chinese had also masteredcomplex mechanics, and had water clocks and accurate astronomical instruments=they were capable ofpredicting lunar and solar eclipses.
So waht happened?In the 1600’s, China was visited by the Jesuit missionary, Fr. Matteo Ricci. He found that nobody remembered how to use the astronomical instruments at the imperial observatory in Peking! Later, China was invaded by the manchus, and the last imperial government fell in the “Boxer” rebellion of 1900. Why did the Chinese regress? From being first in the world in AD 1300, they were perhaps the weakest power by 1900…why did they go into such a precipitous decline? :eek:
Did it really regress or just slow down while Europe progressed (technologically)? China turned inward in the 15th century while Europe was expanding outward. That might sound overly simplistic, but I think that was a major, if not the major, cause. The “professional civil service system” turned into more of entrenched bureaucracy that reinforced the status quo. We’ve seen many great powers (Rome, Byzantium, The Ottomans) suffer a simlar fate. The real interesting question might be: will the West suffer a similar fate at some point in the future?
Short answer: a deeply ingrained cultural adherence to Confucianism, which taught (among other things) that a civilized society was one which adhered to ancient traditions with unyielding resolve, and that qualified advisors had to be highly skilled in aesthetic arts. You thus ended up with an ingrained government culture that promoted Ministers and Advisors based not on their technical knowledge or intelligence, but by how well they could compose poetry or paint.
I’m vastly oversimplifying things, of course – we’re talking 4,000 years of history and a college course from over a decade ago 
– but IMO a big part of the problem was simply the inflexible nature of Confucian philosophy, which resulted in a very conservative Imperial government fearful of making the changes needed to adapt with the times.
I’m going to (mildly) query the premise here. The Chinese certainly had made relatively grand achievements in astronomy early on. I suspect you’ve in mind the famous astronomical clock constructed by Su Sung and Han Kung-Lien c.1090, which is surely the greatest feat of water clock design ever built. But none of this, or the related achievements, actually made it into Polo’s account of his travels. There are plenty of references therein to “astrologers” who can be lumped in with soothsayers, but there’s really only the one passage that even touches on the astronomical sophistication of China at the time. In it he notes that they can predict planetary positions months in advance. Yet this was also routine in the West at the time.
I’m also interested in the source for the claim that Ricci thought that Chinese astronomy had declined. Jonathan Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (1984; Penguin, 1985) doesn’t specifically discuss Ricci’s assessment of astronomical practice, but does say of the period that (p146):
Spence goes on to argue that Ricci saw his opportunity as introducing Western theoretical ideas about astronomy into China. In hindsight, this is partly true, though Joseph Needham had already latched onto the nice counterexample: a letter where Ricci complained that “they do not believe in crystalline celestial spheres” (The Grand Titration, 1969; Allen, 1979, p23).
More generally, I agree that the obvious argument is not that China declined, it’s that the West overtook them.
Imperial Chinese governmental philosophy was not quite that rigid. Although it had its peak in teh Qin dynasty, there was a strong streak of legalism running through all Chinese imperial governmental philosophies. Legalism was an almost values-neutral system that encouraged governmental pragmatism and efficient governance.
I like the idea of a meritocracy too - I think this is an excellent way to keep a society stable and well-governed. I don’t even disagree with the idea of potential civil servants being tested on their communication skills and knowledge of Chinese history and literature - seems like a good system for getting talented people to the top, very similar to the English Civil Service of days past. The bit I do object to is the idea that they would only be tested on a specific canon of literature that admitted of few alternate views.
I suppose that if one values stability and safety over all things, this is a recipe for cycles of conquest and stagnation…
Does this ring a bell for anyone? I remember a while ago a new book that came out about why China declined, I’m pretty sure it was a documentary as well but I can’t for the life of me remember the name of the book.
The author reckoned that the emporer died and the ‘academics’ took over, causing the decline. The academics were scared of the outside world and into confucianism ofcourse and recalled a fleet of ships, larger than the Armada and burned the plans for any ship with more than one mast. Part of the evidence for the fleet is apparently people who are descendents of one of the fleet ships that ship-wrecked on the East African coast. The author goes in search of these people and finds a group of people who look Chinese.
Doubtful. The “status quo” in the West has not been anything close to stable since the Middle Ages. It started to change in the Renaissance and has changed at an ever-accelerating pace ever since. Hard to imagine how any bureaucracy, however entrenched and powerful and narrow-minded, could keep a lid on all that. Even in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, things changed.
Confucius said, and this is almost verbatim, that “a good son will run the farm exactly the way his father did for at least five years after the father’s death.” Note the assumptions embedded in that.
In looking out on a chaotic, barbaric world outside its gates, neo-Confucianism became overwhemongly reactionary. Change of any kind was deemed as decay, and when they did meet other developed nations, the Chinese reflexively treated them as barbarians who could teach them nothing.
In contrast, Europe developed and grew in a competitive hothouse of civilizations and innovations circulated.
There are some old threads on this topic, a buddy of mine wrote his PhD on the subject. IIRC the main thing is that the Ming and Qing dynasties turned inward and stopped external contact. Plus China was pretty dang isolated geographically in those days. Didn’t have the external competition.
Please note, Qin dynasty was 2000 years ago and lasted jsut over 30 years. It was extremely rigid and the first totalitarian state.
The modern literati official examination system didn’t start until much more recently. I’d have to check but I think the Ming Dynasty was when the examination system really developed.
In his book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers , Paul Kennedy argues that the Ming dynasty, following the Mongol khanate, had a “restoration” culture that was much more conservative and unprogressive than the Sung dynasty before the invasions. And the famous Cheng Ho expeditions, while impressive looking, were politically motivated showcases that did little to actually foster a culture of exploration.
Furthermore, Cheng Ho’s (or Zheng-He’s) trade-and-exploration program had a brief run, and was shut down by Mandarins who feared the disruptive influence of contact with the outside world.
I worded that poorly-- my mistake. I didn’t mean to ask whether the West would suffer the same fate for the same reason, but just whether or not some other power will overtake us technologically at some point.
Probably Gavin Menzies’ 1421: The Year Discovered the World. While Zheng-He’s armada and his voyages have been recognised by Western specialists for some time, the significance Menzies attaches to them hasn’t convinced those same specialists.
That’s actually 1421: The Year China Discovered the World. Presumably some sort of Freudian slip there.
Other people have written about the ‘Tresure Fleet’ before Menzies ( and with a lot less crackpot theorizing, I might add ) - Louise Levathes’ When China Ruled the Seas:* The Treasure Fleet Voyages of the Dragon Throne, 1405-1433* ( 1994, Oxford University Press ), for example.
There has also been a fair bit of revisionist history that seeks to refute the stereotype of China as a completely inward-looking and closed-off society, even in the later the Ming and Qing periods. The Sextants of Beijing: * Global Currents in Chinese History* ( 1999, Norton books ) by Joanna Waley-Cohen being pretty good example.
The decline was really very rapid - China in the mid-18th century was still a very vibrant, major power and an aggressively expansionist one at that ( not a lot of people realize that virtually all of what is now the western half of China on maps was only permanently conquered in the 17th and 18th centuries - Ming China was ~ half the size of China today ). However starting in the 17th century Qing China “suffered” a massive population boom - the result of a final synergy between a long internal peace and the culmination of centuries of agricultural refinement. Qing burecracy, already somewhat skeletal, failed to keep pace, with a concurrent increase in internal disorder. Opium almost by its lonesome reversed centuries of net trade surpluses, eventually causing a massive bleed of hard currency overseas and greatly depressing the silver-based Chinese economy. As internal disorder multiplied and the Chinese imperial government ossified after the 1790’s, a serious of major revolts, especially the most incredibly destructive civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion, devastated and further destabilized China. Meanwhile the industrial revolution gradually allowed Europe to undersell domestic Chinese goods, a situation that accelerated as China plunged into chaos in the mid-19th century.
Despite this, China struggled hard to modernize in the mid-to-late 19th century in particular, much as Japan and the Ottomans did in the same period. Japan succeeded, China and the Ottoman state, partly through their own failures and partly due to outside events sweeping them up, did not.
- Tamerlane
Japan also “inward looking” . . . in fact, Japan was absolutely sealed off from contact with the outside world from the rise to power of the Tokugawa shoguns in 1603, until Commodore Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay in 1853. Why is it that Japan was strong enough to modernize itself and meet the West on equal terms, while China was helpless to resist the encroachments of the Europeans?
Here’s another question - why have the Chinese modernization projects failed so many times?
Tell more, Uncle Tamerlane!
Thanks to Tammerlane for covering the recent Chinese history of the Qing Dynasty. On thing overlooked was that china was a conquored nation occupied and controled by the Manchu’s. Manchu’s were just another nail in the coffin along with population boom, massive opium addiction, Taiping Rebellion, military encroachment by western nations, etc.
Japan was a completely different situation at the time Perry sailed his black ships in.
Why Chinese modernization failed is a long question. At what stage in history? Fairly recent history saw about 100 years of continuous warfare that started with the Taiping Rebellion. China wasn’t really unified until 1949, and it still took more than a decade to really subjugate Tibet and some of the other more remote provinces.
Post 1949 the troubles are too numerous to list, but some highlights are the 100 flowers movement that destroyed the intellectuals, disasterous great leap forward followed by famine and massive starvation, 5-6 really horrid years of anarchy during the cultural revolution, and finally modernization that basically started around 1980. From an economic and standard of living point of view, 1980 - present has been one of the modern success stories in the world.
Thanks, China. My knowledge of modern Chinese history (post-'WWII) is mostly limited to Xinjiang. I’d add a note that “China” is still not quite a unified entity, with several disputes…
Man, this damn cable upgrade in my neighborhood is giving me fits - stupid broadband keeps dropping out and I couldn’t watch the Deawood finale last night ( I work Sunday nights - if I my cable goes out again on the Friday night rerun, I’m really going to be pissed ). Anyway, the post I was about to make a little while a go…
Japan did suffer some of the same pressures for awhile. After 1866 imports exceeded exports and while the tremendous demand for exported tea and raw silk caused local shortages as increased demand surpassed increased production, imports of cheap cotton textiles devastated the local industry and caused, as in China with its opium problem, a net drain on hard currency ( especially gold in this case, which was overvalued by the Tokugawa Bakufu, where five silver coins could be changed for one gold coin vs. an international standard of 15-1, which meant that until measures were taken to devalue the currency, the river of silver flowing out of China could be used to suck Japan dry of gold ).
However Japan had a number of advantages. One was that there was quite frankly less pressure on Japan, partly because Japan was a lesser market compared to China and partly because Japan, which had been forcefully exposed as being in an inferior position in one dramatic moment, very pragmatically did not get themselves into spitting matches until they were capable of handling the Europeans on closer to even terms. China, meanwhile, less realistic and less in control of events, suffered from the aftermath of such affairs as the Opium Wars and the Boxer Rebellion.
Moreover Japan’s long isolated stagnation under a single stifling regime had in a sense ‘gentled’ down the country. Despite the brief, violent upheavals of the disenfranchised samurai/shizoku elites and the occasional peasant protests over the disruptions of reform, it was really much easier to establish strong central control in Japan than China. No real ethnic minorities ( powerless Ainu excepted ), religious minorities defanged compared to the bad old days, smallish country with no unstable borders or real places for rebels to hide for very long, peasant militancy largely and long since beaten into the dust by centuries of tight central absolutism and a concentration of military resources in a socially seperate military caste. Japan suffered nothing compared to the internal upheavals China did and did not start from a point of re-building from utter social chaos as both China and the Ottomans were forced too.
Finally the Meiji Restoration, outward trappings of imperial rule aside, was ultimately a really quite radical revolution, perhaps every bit as radical as the American Revolution. Unlike the moribund Qing and Ottoman edifices that had to negotiate reforms within the context of decrepit governments with strong reactionary elements, Japan was in a way free to re-invent itself and did so in truly dynamic fashion. Possibly because tJapan was so isolated, yet orderly, much more so and later than China, the shock and impetus to rebuild when their werak position was exposed was also greater.
Well part of it you can deduce from my above comments on Japan. Both China and Japan suffered from popular resistance to change by those frightened by the implications of modernization ( just as the Luddites and similar groups had protested the Industrial Revolution in the west decades earlier ), but Japan was much better positioned to overcome that kind of societal inertia. Further the imperial edifice really was not as nimble and efficient at tackling reform ( indeed was structurally incapable of being so ) as the Meiji government. Also the timing was piss-poor - the internal crisis of 1850-1875 really shattered the country in many ways ( among other things the government had to borrow heavily from the west ). China was perennially dead broke - Japan was always able to keep a steady revenue stream by taxing the peasantry, something China could only sporadically accomplish ( and even then there was a far more massive agrarian regression in China and a need to rebuild from major destruction ). Further the internal and external wars resulted in China concentrating disproportionally on economically unproductive military industries, slighting economic and administrative reforms, whereas Japan had the luxury of following a much more balanced approach. Consequently by the late 1890’s Japan was not only self-sufficient in modern, mass-produced cotton textiles - it was horning in on European exports of the same to places like China, doing their own part to undermine the Chinese economy.
- Tamerlane