User:The great huha/The "great divergence" between China and Europe

From 1500 on, there was an increasingly large gap between Western nations and the rest of the world in terms of science, culture, and economics. Samuel Huntington coined the term "great divergence" to describe this phenomena. This article treats the specific case of China and Europe.

Chinese science peaked under the Song dynasty in the eleventh century and twelfth century. Printing was commonplace in China centuries before it arrived in Europe. Unlike Europe, Medieval breakthroughs were not followed up with a Renaissance or a Scientific Revolution. By the time the Jesuits arrived in the 16th century, the country had regressed and much had been forgotten. Literati were surprised when the Jesuits told them the Earth was round as they had assumed it was flat. All the same, the Jesuits had a highly favorable view of China. They argued that the civil service exams were part of a system that created a meritocracy in which the wisest ruled.

Such idealization did not survive more direct contact with the country. H.G. Wells, whose history was a standard treatment for many decades, suggested that China's "barbaric orthography" was responsible for the country falling behind the West. A Chinese could study for many years, yet learn little more than how to read and write, according to Wells. Later, Mark Elvin argued that cheap labor reduced the need for labor-saving devices, allowing the country to regress into a "high-end equilibrium trap."

The historians

Oswald Spengler

The Whig historians saw Anglo-Saxon democracy as the highest level of society. The past was arranged as a "line of progress" leading to this conclusion. Civilizations were rungs on a ladder that humanity climbed to reach the glorious present. Oswald Spengler denounced this "egotistical" view of history. World War I shattered confidence in humanity's future and left intellectuals willing to consider Spengler's darker vision. In Decline of the West (1918), Spengler proposed that societies could be viewed as living organisms that went through life cycles.

H.G. Wells

Outline of History (1920) by H.G. Wells was treated as the standard history of the world for decades. The final edition was published in 1971. Much of the book can be sourced to the classic 1911 edition of Britannica.

Joseph Needham

Needham's Question: “Why, then, did modern science, as opposed to ancient and medieval science (with all that modern science implied in terms of political dominance) develop only in the Western world?”

Chinese might turn this question on its head: "why didn’t Europe begin developing a bureaucratic state until the mid-nineteenth century?"

Mark Elvin

In The Pattern of the Chinese Past (1973), Mark Elvin provided an influential reinterpretation of Chinese history. Whereas Wells portrayed the Tang dynasty as China's golden age, Elvin demonstrated that the Song was more advanced technologically and far more prosperous. He also studied the problem of why China did not experience an Industrial Revolution. He concluded that the country was trapped in a "high-level equilibrium" of cheap labor that made labor-saving devices unnecessary.

Does science need heroes?

Spengler attributes the rise of the West to the "Faustian inventor," a man who bends nature to the force of his will. (This is a reference to the enormous canal building project undertaken by Goethe's Faust, not to his bargain with the devil.) The revival of this spirit in the West, dormant since the days of Archimedes, can be seen in the Gothic architecture of the High Middle Ages. Spengler acknowledges that the Chinese also invented various devices, including the compass, the telescope, printing, gunpowder, paper and porcelain. But these inventions were "wheedled" out of nature rather than "wrested" by an inventor determined to exploit them. In making civilizational progress a matter of virility, Spengler is applying Nietzsche's philosophy to the history of technology.

Did "barbaric orthography" hold Chiina back?

Wells laid the blame on China's complex writing system. The script imprisoned the Chinese mind and was, "so difficult that the mental energy of the country has been largely consumed in acquiring it," he wrote. Traditional education consisted of little more than learning how to read classical Chinese, and intellectual initiative was discouraged by the rigid examination system. The difficulties of reading the classical language, which was still the standard form of communication in Wells' time, may explain why printing had far less social impact in China than it did in Europe.

In response to Wells' points, it should be noted that Europe's Scientific Revolution of the 17th century was recorded and transmitted in Latin. Although Latin is notoriously difficult for non-Latin speakers to write, this does not appear to have hindered progress. In fact, the use of a classical language has definite advantages. It made international communication easier and it allowed contemporary scholars direct access to the ancient texts. In China, vernacular script would have created a barrier between North and South. Wells condemns Chinese characters as a "barbaric orthography," and argues for a phonetic writing system. The Chinese language uses tone to make lexical distinctions, so it cannot be written in a toneless phonetic script like those developed in Japan and Korea. The only other major language with a similar problem is Vietnamese. In the 1920s, Vietnam switched from Chinese characters to a version of the Latin alphabet that indicates tone.

Stagnation is not unique to China

Wells notes that other civilizations, including Classical Greece, also experienced astonishing spurts of innovation and brilliance that were followed by extended periods of decay. It is the breakthrough in the West that is unique and requires explanation, not the more normal pattern that prevailed in China.

Taoism and Confucianism

Needham's answer: "while the five-element (wu-hxing 五行) and two-force (yin-yang 陰陽) theories were favourable rather than inimical to the development of scientific thought in China, the elaborated symbolic system of the Book of Changes was almost from the start a mischievous handicap. It tempted those who were interested in Nature to rest in explanations that were no explanations at all. The Book of Changes was a system for pigeon-holing novelty and then doing nothing more about it."

Elvin argues that Confucianism is less friendly to a scientific worldview. When Neo-Confucianism displaced Daoism as the empire's dominant ideology, it was a step backwards.

Labor and agriculture

Elvin also examined the question of why China did not experience an industrial revolution. He argued that labor was so cheap in China that there was no economic incentive for technical innovation, allowing the country to regress into a "high-end equilibrium trap". (Spengler makes a similar argument with regard to the Roman Empire, i.e. that slavery made labor-saving devices unnecessary and even socially disruptive.)

In the Tang and Song, Chinese peasants shifted from millet to rice. Rice provides the most nutrition per acre of any crop, although is more labor intensive. China's agricultural expansion southward was complete by the middle of the Song. Once this land had been converted to rice paddies, more work would not have produced more food. In Ming and Qing times, population density was near the maximum that the land could support. In Europe, the amount of land under cultivation continued to expand, so animal power and other labor saving techniques had greater value.

Mathematics

Elvin lists books on mathematics, especially algebra, published during the Song dynasty. Although few of the books themselves have survived, there was promising research in this area, inspired by Daoist numerology. One lost work claims to have solved algebraic problems with as many as three unknowns. By Ming times, positional algebra was a lost art, a Daoist abstraction of no interest to the Confucian literati.

The rise and fall of industry

Copper pollution found in Greeland ice cores suggests that industrial output in eleventh century China was comparable to that in the Roman Empire, and far ahead of any other pre-modern society.

China had developed mechanical spinners to spin hemp fiber by the fourteenth century. The earliest surviving description of such a device is in Treatise on Agriculture (1313) by Wang Chen. "It takes a spinner many days to spin a hundred catties, but with water power it may be done with supernatural speed," Wang wrote.

When cotton was introduced during the Ming dynasty, China reverted to hand spinning. Cotton fibers are much shorter than hemp fibers, so the mechanical spinners would have required substantial adjustment. The country's inventive spark had burned out by this time. It no longer had the Faustian inventors required to do the job, as Spengler would put it. By the 17th century, the technology was forgotten. Europe developed similar technology in the 18th century.

Europe and China: History in parallel

For centuries, China and Europe had developed in parallel. The Warring States squabbled much like the Greek city states of Athens, Sparta, and Thebes. Qin Shi Huang unified Classical Chinese civilization, much as Alexander unified the Greeks. Both the Roman Empire and the Han Empire flourished during a period of warm climate, and they both established classical models for their respective cultures. Both broke apart when the climate cooled. North China, like the Western Roman Empire, fell under barbarian domination. The ruler of the Northern Wei adopted Chinese ways much as the Franks were romanized under Charlemagne. The classical flame still burned in Nanjing, as it did in Constantinople.

"Charlemagne's empire corresponded to that of the Siberian dynasty (Later Wei), the temporary recovery of the Western empire by Justinian corresponded to the temporary recovery of the north by Liu Yu," wrote H.G. Wells. "The Byzantine line corresponded to the southern dynasties. But from this point the two worlds diverged. China recovered her unity; Europe has still to do so."

Sui dynasty: China reunified

Not only did the Sui reunite China politically, they also restored classical Confucian culture, albeit with a place added for the universalist religion of Buddhism. Once Christianized, Europe was never tempted to return the gods of Olympus.

China naturally divides North and South, just as Europe West and East. But there are no natural boundaries among the provinces in North China equivalent to the Alps, the Pyrenees, or the Channel. At the time of Sui, the South was still thinly populated. A strong ruler in the North could conquer the South almost as an afterthought. Mass migration to the South began in the late Tang.

Song dynasty

With commerce, art, and learning booming and philosophy revitalized, China in the Song had much in common with the Europe of the High Middle Ages. Wood-block printing was a commonplace in China long before Gutenberg. Zhu Xi pushed the Confucian approach as far as it would go, just as Thomas Aquinas was doing the same for scholasticism.

European science emerges

In Europe, the High Middle Ages was a prelude to the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution. For China, the Song was a cultural and intellectual plateau that was followed by centuries of stagnation.

Scientific research was a priority for the Medieval Church, part of its project to "join faith to reason." Numerous prominent churchmen engaged in it. Chinese shipbuilders might develop methods of construction, her printers improve their technique, and her farmers advance agriculture. But the concerns of the intellectual class lay elsewhere. By 1200, the main works of Aristotle, Plato, Euclid, Ptolemy, Archimedes and Galen had all been translated into Latin, often from Arabic as many of the Greek originals were lost at this point. Universities were established to teach them. In other words, the basic classical cannon, aside from Thucydides, was being taught to Medieval students long before the Renaissance.

In the thirteenth century, European scientists began to make original contributions, beginning with Liber Abaci (1215) by Fibonnaci, a breakthrough work of mathematics. The advance of science only made it more difficult to accomodate faith, as the Church demanded. Many hoped that Thomas, who wrote Summa Theologica in 1265-1273, could reconcile the two. Such unrealistic expectations could only lead to disappointment. The Church decided to reign in aspects of science deemed incompatable with faith. In 1277, the Bishop of Paris condemned a list of 219 propositions associated with Aristotle and other philosophers. The bishop had the authority to regulate the School of Paris, then Europe's top center of education. Aristotle had been treated as the font scientific thought up to this point, so this was an attempt to pull the rug out from under secular philosophy. Happily, the culture of reason proved to be robust enough to take a punch. In fact, the condemnation of 1277 inspired a productive reassessment of Aristotle's views.

The waning of the Middle Ages

The thirteenth century was the peak of the Medieval Warm Period. The fourteenth was a century of catastrophes in both China and Europe, including the Black Death (1348–1350) and the Hundred Year War (1337 - 1453). In The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), Dutch historian Huizinga describes this period as a time when Medieval culture could no longer inspire, but Renaissance culture had yet to appear. The most notable of these catastrophes was the Black Death, which struck in 1348. The climate-induced setbacks of the fourteenth century shook the control the Church had exercised over Europe's intellectual life. A rise of humanism followed, as well as a burst of creativity, and new modes thought.

China's reaction to the collapse of its Medieval culture was radically different: Neo-Confucian orthodoxy was restored with counterreformationary zeal. Absolutism and a brutalized style of rule, both Yuan legacies, made it more difficult for literati to advance dissenting views. The literati turned inward in response to foreign conquest.