Why the Twentieth Century Was Not a Chinese Century

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

by gwern • 13 years ago

58 47 13 years ago

delong.typepad.com

padobson4• 13 years ago

"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• 13 years ago

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.

padobson4• 13 years ago

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.

angersock• 13 years ago

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.

HowardMei• 13 years ago

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.

padobson4• 13 years ago

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

No. We're screwed too.

padobson4• 13 years ago

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.

total__C• 13 years ago

So modern Chinese consider their country to have been stagnant during the entirety of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties? I've read a number of Western books about Qing-era China trying to understand the same questions the linked article discusses - why China doesn't already rule the world. The way things are presented, the Qing rulers and court just seem to be generally incompetent and isolated from their contemporary reality.

So within China the understanding is that the problems go back to before the Qing?

purplelobster3• 13 years ago

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.

Symmetry• 13 years ago

Really he just says that china was way ahead in 1200 and way behind in 1870. It's really hard to say when one pulled ahead of the other since there are so many areas you could compare in, but I'd put the transition point somewhere around 1650, near the fall of the Ming.

moogleii• 13 years ago

What is the argument that you're trying to refute? I got more of a vibe from your comment. I feel like this is a great opportunity for the AskHistorians subreddit. But I think generalizing to just Europe says something, though, rather than comparing countries to countries. And while I do agree there has likely been some exaggeration, I also think you may be underestimating the logistics of massive populations considering the time period (as well as just how early they had certain things, if you're ever near the Met in NY, check out their Chinese stuff and the dates next to them, though their collection is pretty small).

The best hypotheses I've seen (which I can't find, it was in passing long ago somewhere), suggests European division fueled a lot of later innovation. War does seem to drive technology. When you're China back then, who are you really competing against? You've already finished the conquering and unification phase that individual European countries are still dreaming about. So why do you need guns? You're essentially Rome of East Asia (and Romans are no more, perhaps not a coincidence). Korea, Japan, and Vietnam are either vassals or non-threats. You've got silk, porcelain (which itself was pretty amazing compared to "European" alternatives), and tea to pass your time instead (and to trade with). You're already pretty huge for the time period, and managing a country of that size and technology level is already pretty challenging. Meanwhile, Europe is a perfect climate for border skirmishing and competition. When England came knocking on China's door in a more aggressive fashion, the Emperor at the time still had arrogant delusions about China's comparative might. And they paid for that. But the opium wars and WW2 were a wake up call.

Also, glass. China never discovered glass, and glass unlocked all sorts of technologies.

Edit: So the other way of looking at it is: The Han tribe did get ahead of their neighbors with all their fancy doodads early on, and perhaps that's why China is the size it is now. The Romans almost did it in their local sphere, and arguably England later, although by then technological spread was more uniform. If ancient Europe had been sitting next to ancient China, perhaps they'd be speaking Chinese now?

purplelobster3• 13 years ago

It makes sense to compare China to Europe instead of single European countries because they can both be considered civilizations. The difference being that China has always been striving for unification (although throughout much of it's history has actually been divided or in civil war if you'd call it that). Had Qin Shi Huang not imposed cultural and economical uniformity perhaps China would be more like Europe today?

My argument was mostly against popular literature presenting this world view where China just stumbled a little bit and where the rise of the west was almost accidental. I see this all over in "insight porn" type literature. This article sort of started out like that but my knee jerk reaction was wrong.

gtr32x2• 13 years ago

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)?

A few examples, Pythagoras Theorem is called 勾股定理 in China, named after its individual discoverer Gou Gu from China. Circa 1090~ AD, There is a book called 梦溪笔谈 by Sheng Kuo consisting of discussion of various topics such as Astronomy, Physics, Math etc. Some other books in Math include 数学九章，四元玉鉴。Circa 500～ AD, Zu Chong Zhi figured out Pi to 6 decimal digits. Sorry I didn't have time looking up the English name of those books.

I see you have made your edits thereafter. Though I would just like to say really it's hard to define what is 'awesome' or not as per your argument.

"China invented gun powder, but they didn't use it to gain a military advantage."

So is it awesome to utilize tools made to enhance men's life to slaughter men?

"Most of Chinese philosophy seems to me to be mostly about society and the duty of men etc."

This is largely correct, but it isn't any less than the modern science we have today. Iching in particular is really a science of life, the science of nature. Yet nobody can understand it now.

While I like some of your arguments about China missing out on further opportunities, but to simply dismiss China as not 'awesome' is also an over stretch.

purplelobster3• 13 years ago

Sorry, I'm aware of Chinese, Indian and Islamic mathematics. By "originating" I don't necessarily mean first in everything, but it's hard to argue that Chinese mathematics had as much of an impact.

While I don't condone violence, military technology is a big part of the advantage of western powers up to this point. It has driven innovations in other areas as well.

And I didn't mean to say China is not awesome (just not as awesome back then), I love Chinese history and culture, but my reaction is against the popular sentiment that China was humiliated for ~two centuries and it was just a temporary fluke. I think it began way before then, and that it's not certain that China was on the cusp of a scientific and industrial revolution itself, had not western powers arrived there first.

yetanotherphd• 13 years ago

He is right though, in spite of your examples Chinese mathematics lagged far behind Western mathematics. E.g. By the 1700's, mathematicians were solving Newton's equations using sophisticated approximations, to calculate the future position of the moon.

I'm not inclined towards bold explanations of these differences, but the facts are clear: Western science and mathematics was far beyond anything else in the world at that time.

wavefunction• 13 years ago

Not to be pedantic but the Pythagorean Theorem was probably "discovered" and at least described much earlier than either Pythogoras or "the Chinese."

Gougo only provided a reasoning for the 3-4-5 triangle but not a general solution for other triangles. The Apastamba Sulba Sutra (~600BCE from "India") contained a numerical proof for the theorem. The Assyrians and Babylonians recorded "Pythagorean triples" but didn't mention triangles.

It's only until Euclid comes along that a proper axiomatic proof is provided. None of takes away from all those that contributed to the upward climb that is human history, though. It's high time to appreciate human achievements rather than "national or ethnic" ones.

noname123• 13 years ago

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) 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). 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) 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.

Retric• 13 years ago

which echoes the Chinese medicine’s idea of feedback cycle of Qi

Qi may have some vague similarity to the basic metabolic path, but it's rediculusluy far from being a useful medical principle. Sort of like calling humorism a precursor to the idea of homeostasis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeostasis

PS: Older forms of medicin like Homeopathy are based on a foundation of incorrect assumptions, they are often but not always more useful than doing nothing. However, the foundation of western medicine is do no harm. It replaced the assumption that we know what's going on with the pragmatic acceptance that the human body is to complex to actually understand in detail. At some point we may understand / simulate the human body well enough to change that but no philosophical approach has shown anywhere near the same bennifits simply because randomly choosing a theory when the search space is so large is a waste of time.

Osmium• 13 years ago

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

It's implicit because it's the conventionally accepted view around here. I'm yet to see any evidence that would convince me otherwise, in fact–though I'd be very happy to hear some if you have it!

DougWebb2• 13 years ago

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.

azakai• 13 years ago

Colonial conquest of foreign cultures is a very Western concept.

The Persian, Arab and Mongol empires would beg to differ with you on that one.

bane2• 13 years ago

Colonial conquest of foreign cultures is a very Western concept.

I had a fantastic history teacher many years ago that described the differences something like this:

In the West, they look outward towards new horizons, to plunder and send goods back home. Always forward, but never time for home.

China looks at China, admiring the beauty of it. To get a better view of itself, China takes some steps back and, while admiring itself, may end up trampling nearby neighbors.

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

Colonial conquest of foreign cultures is a very Western concept.

This is far from what the historical sources reveal. Many of the dynastic histories of China recount conquest of neighboring territories, and no one who has read those in the original literary Chinese (as I have, in excerpts) can doubt that there has been an imperialistic, expansionist drive in Chinese history that made China an expanding empire at least as much as in Rome or in Persia.

There is no evidence that traditional Chinese medicine, and especially nonscientific concepts like 氣 qi, have anything to say to improve medical practice in any country. More references about that can be found at the Science-Based Medicine group blog.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?s=qi

Responding also to the blog post kindly submitted here as well as to the comment above, let me disagree in part with the statement "China led the world in political organization as well. No other ruler's writ ran a third as far or has even a third as large a chance of being obeyed as that of China's emperor. Tang Dynasty cavalry skirmished with Persians on the shores of the Aral Sea. The Sung Dynasty river navy was the only military force to even temporarily stymie Chingis Khan's Mongols, before his descendants took to fighting each other rather than expanding the empire. No pre-industrial central government anywhere ever managed to match the reach, extent, and power of the landlord-scholar-bureaucracy mode of domination invented under the Tang and developed under the Sung."

No, China didn't really lead the world in political organization, because China's theory of human nature and thus its theory of politics didn't take enough account of the reality of human greed. China's political philosophy (which I have read extensively in the original writings of Confucius and Mencius that were the state ideology for a long time) is based on finding a virtuous ruler, and (as the blog post correctly points out) giving that ruler unchallenged power. China had an ideal of rule by men rather than rule by laws, but the Roman ideal of rule by laws rather than by men (so that in principle anyone, even the ruler, is subject to law) has proven to be a more durable principle for prevention of corruption and abuse of power. Medieval Europe, even in that harsh era, had more day-by-day personal freedom than China at its height, and that laid the foundation for technological and scientific and economic innovation in the West that helped the West thrive while China stagnated.

pradocchia2• 13 years ago

Well, there is this, by Joseph Needham, in 7 volumes:

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

If you have access to an academic library, they may have a copy.

tokenadult2• 13 years ago

Needham's book series is very interesting, but most professional historians who read ancient Chinese sources in the original language think that Needham engaged in huge amounts of axe-grinding to try to make his Marxist point about the development of science and technology in China.

danmaz743• 13 years ago

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

LiweiZ• 13 years ago

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.

danmaz743• 13 years ago

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.

AsymetricCom2• 13 years ago

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?

mtts2• 13 years ago

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.

bane2• 13 years ago

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.

caoxuwen• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

graycat• 13 years ago

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.

AsymetricCom2• 13 years ago

Certainly a good theory that I've also considered myself. It's a fundamental cost that every person goes through. You can contribute to the social sphere until 20+ years of literature education.

mtts2• 13 years ago

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.

Theodores• 13 years ago

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.

beloch• 13 years ago

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.

Why the Twentieth Century Was Not a Chinese Century

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