Some China scholars would mitigate the pain by euphemism: “Chinese society, though stable, was far from static and unchanging…the pace was slower…the degree of change less.”15 (True, but the issue remains.) Others dismiss the question as unanswerable or illegitimate. Unanswerable because it is said to be impossible to explain a negative. (This is certainly not true in logic; the explanation of large-scale failure and success is inevitably complicated, but that is what history is all about.) Illegitimate because where is the failure? The very use of the word imposes non-Chinese standards and expectations on China. (But why not? Why should one not expect China to be curious about nature and to want to understand it? To cumulate knowledge and go from one discovery to another? To pursue economic growth and development? To want to do more work with less labor? The earlier successes of China in these respects make these questions the more pertinent.)16
What about the relations between science and technology? Did the one matter to the other? After all, science was not initially a major contributor to the European Industrial Revolution, which built largely on empirical advances by practitioners. What difference, then, to Chinese technology if science had slowed to a crawl by the seventeenth century?
The answer, I think, is that in both China and Europe, science and technology were (and are) two sides of the same coin. The response to new knowledge of either kind is of a piece, and the society that closes its eyes to novelty from the one source has already been closing it to novelty from the other.
In addition, China lacked institutions for finding and learning—schools, academies, learned societies, challenges and competitions. The sense of give-and-take, of standing on the shoulders of giants, of progress—all of these were weak or absent. Here was another paradox. On the one hand, the Chinese formally worshipped their intellectual ancestors; in 1734, an imperial decree required court physicians to make ritual sacrifices to their departed predecessors.17 On the other, they let the findings of each new generation slip into oblivion, to be recovered later, perhaps, by antiquarian and archeological research.*
The history of Chinese advances, then, is one of points of light, separated in space and time, unlinked by replication and testing, obfuscated by metaphor and pseudo-profundity, limited in diffusion (nothing comparable to European printing)—in effect, a scattering of ephemera. Much of the vocabulary was invented for the occasion and fell as swiftly into disuse, so that scholars today spend a good deal of their effort deciphering these otherwise familiar ideograms. Much thought remained mired in metaphysical skepticism and speculation. Here Confucianism, with its easy disdain for scientific research, which it disparaged as “interventionist” and superficial, contributed its discouraging word: “With the microscope you see the surface of things…. But do not suppose you are seeing the things in themselves.”*
This want of exchange and challenge, this subjectivity, explains the uncertainty of gains and the easy loss of impetus. Chinese savants had no way of knowing when they were right. It is subsequent research, mostly Western, that has discovered and awarded palms of achievement to the more inspired. Small wonder that China reacted so unfavorably to European imports. European knowledge was not only strange and implicitly belittling. In its ebullience and excitement, its urgency and competitiveness, its brutal commitment to truth and efficacy (Jesuits excepted), it went against the Chinese genius.
So the years passed, and the decades, and the centuries. Europe left China far behind. At first unbelieving and contemptuous, China grew anxious and frustrated. From asking and begging, the Westerners became insistent and impatient. The British saw two embassies dismissed with contempt. The third time, in 1839, they came in gunboats and blew the door down. Other Western nations followed suit, and then the Japanese, with their own pretensions to dominion after the Meiji Restoration (1868), moved to secure their place alongside Great Britain, France, Germany, and Russia.
Even so, the outsiders barely scratched the surface of the porcelain kingdom: some trading cities along the coast; uncertain spheres of influence in the interior; the right to import opium, kerosene, and manufactures. These represented only a small fraction of the market, but the potential size of the market—so many people!—made China the legendary El Dorado of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Inside the brittle skin, the empire was restless, the people unhappy, the mandarinate divided, the rulers insecure. The Qing (pronounced “Ching”) dynasty (1644-1912), remember, was of Manchu origin. A small nomadic people of perhaps 1 million seized a nation of hundreds of millions and held them captive for two hundred fifty years. To be sure, the dynasty had adopted and been absorbed into Chinese culture, but the difference in manners, descent, and privilege remained. Markers (the obligation of Chinese males to wear the pigtail) distinguished rulers from ruled—a thorn in the flesh of the Chinese people. And while most of the administration was necessarily Chinese and these officials did not want for diligence and loyalty, they were inevitably diminished by their inherited inferiority and tainted by their collaboration.
The first years of the new dynasty saw improvement. Peace and order were restored; food supply kept up with demand. This was Europe’s greatest gift to the people that thought it had everything: new crops (potatoes, sweet potatoes, peanuts) that could be grown on otherwise barren, upland soils. But now Chinese population grew sharply—the traditional Malthusian response—and when food supply leveled off, famine, hunger, and civil unrest returned. The Kangxi (K’ang Hsi) emperor (1662-1722) was barely in his grave when the trouble started, easily suppressed at first but a gathering storm.
Chinese thoughts turned easily to xenophobia. The foreigner became a focus of fear and hatred, the presumed source of difficulty, oppression, and humiliation. Much of this indictment was justified: superior power does not bring out the best in people. But insofar as it shifted responsibility for native ills, it was a self-defeating escapism. Most potent and costly of these internal explosions was the so-called Taiping rebellion (1850-64), a religiously inspired revolt that for all its nativism was part Christian-millenarian and took over a decade to suppress, at the cost of 20 million lives.
All this anger blocked economic modernization. Foreign ownership and management, for example, immensely complicated the introduction of railways. Steamboats were equated with gunboats—instruments of penetration and oppression. Mechanization, discouraged by an abundance of cheap labor and the reluctance of women to work outside the home, was tarred with the same brush.18 As a result, factory industry barely had a foothold at the end of the nineteenth century, creeping into the foreign settlements of the treaty ports, extraterritorial carbuncles on the hide of the Chinese empire. Since the country could not defend itself against imports by tariffs—forbidden by the unequal treaties imposed from outside—these “plantation” enterprises had little exemplary influence on the domestic economy. China remained overwhelmingly agricultural with a scattered overlay of handicraft industry.
And poor. Evariste Hue, who traveled through China as a missionary from 1839 to 1851, bears witness to the misery:
…unquestionably there can be found in no other country such a depth of disastrous poverty as in the Celestial Empire. Not a year passes in which a terrific number of persons do not perish of famine in some part or other of China; and the multitude of those who live merely from day to day is incalculable. Let a drought, a flood, or any accident whatever occur to injure the harvest in a single province, and two thirds of the population are immediately reduced to starvation. You see them forming up into numerous bands—perfect armies of beggars—and proceeding together, men, women, and children, to seek some little nourishment in the towns and villages…. Many faint by the wayside and die before they can reach the place where they had hoped to find help. You see their bodies lying in the fields and by the roadside, and you pass without taking notice—so familiar is the horrible spectacle.19
“Modern Universal Science, Yes; Western Science, No!”
Nothing troubles a hi
storian’s spirit more than the wounds of the past. This seems to be especially true when studying those countries and peoples whom time has mistreated. Once rich, they have become poor. Once mighty, they have fallen. Such losers and victims carry with them the memory of better days and resentments that feed on bitter experience. And the historian, who seeks to understand them and to translate them for others, who wants to know and love them, finds himself caught up in the campaign to justify their past, to assert their dignity, to salve their wounds.
This is a worthy mission. It can, however, get in the way of science. Nowhere is this more evident than in the historiography of China, navel of the universe, the earth’s richest and most populous empire a thousand years ago, still an object of admiration some three hundred years ago, only to be brought down to derision and pity thereafter. The desire of sinologists to defend China from outrageous outsiders has spawned a small industry of defensive scholarship, typically erudite and ipso facto intimidating, designed to enhance Chinese performance and correct Western criticisms.
Nowhere is this strain-to-maintain more prominent, indeed intrusive, than in discussions of the alleged failure of Chinese science and technology, especially in the context of Chinese contacts with Europe. Many China experts are not happy to be reminded of this failure, for two reasons primarily. First, Westerners have often seen it as a mark of weakness and as proof of their superiority. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries even those visitors who admired China in general, and its government, its philosophy, its walled cities, its rectangular street patterns, its manufactures, and number of other aspects in particular, usually condemned and scorned Chinese science. Very awkward.
Secondly, nothing has been more distressing to the people and government of the new China than this condescension. In the past, the Chinese saw their land as “the one true center of civilization.”20 How should they see it now—a caboose at the end of a European train? How to reconcile the pursuit of Western science with a legacy of sublime self-esteem? The answer: to stress the worldwide character of scientific inquiry and technological advance—one common stream—and highlight Chinese contributions to that enterprise. “The achievements of China’s ancient science and technology prove that the Chinese people have the ability needed to occupy their rightful place among the world’s peoples.”21
Western sinologues have taken up the cudgels. One tactic has been to minimize the import of the contrast. What’s all the fuss about? Why this fascination with West-East contacts and conflicts? China, these scholars contend, had its own history to live, and to see this solely in terms of confrontation, as a puppet of Europe-driven challenge and response, is to diminish it and empty it of its essence. Look in more than out.
The old emperors would have approved. But that kind of argument adds little to our understanding, for it is simply irrelevant to the issue of Chinese regression. You do not solve a major historical problem by pretending it does not exist and telling people to look elsewhere.
A somewhat similar dismissal says that we simply do not know enough about Chinese science to ask the question. To pose it would be “an utter waste of time, and distracting as well…until the Chinese tradition has been adequately comprehended from the inside.”22 (Until when? It is always a good idea to learn more about one’s subject, but not at the expense of shelving important and timely questions. In fact, Nathan Sivin, author of this caution and collaborator with Joseph Needham in the exploration of the history of Chinese science, ignores his own advice and turns to this issue in other contexts.)
More to the point has been an effort to accentuate the positive by painting a happy picture of Chinese achievements in the context of ecumenical science. This we might call the multicultural approach: knowledge is a house of many mansions, and diverse civilizations have each taken their own path to their own truth. And then, in science at least, all these truths merged in a common product. Here is Sivin again:
The historical discoveries of the last generation have left no basis for the old myths that the ancestry of modern science is exclusively European and that before modern times no other civilization was able to do science except under European influence. We have gradually come to understand that scientific traditions differing from the European tradition in fundamental respects—from techniques, to institutional settings, to views of nature and man’s relation to it—existed in the Islamic world, India, and China, and in smaller civilizations as well. It has become clear that these traditions and the tradition of the Occident, far from being separate streams, have interacted more or less continuously from their beginnings until they were replaced by local versions of the modern science that they have all helped to form.23
This is the new myth, put forward as a given. Like other myths, it aims to shape the truth to higher ends, to form opinion in some other cause. In this instance, the myth is true in pointing out that modern science, in the course of its development, took up knowledge discovered by other civilizations; and that it absorbed and combined such knowledge and know-how with European findings. The myth is wrong, however, in implying a continuing symmetrical interaction among diverse civilizations.
In the beginning, when China and others were ahead, almost all the transmission went one way, from the outside to Europe. That was Europe’s great virtue: unlike China, Europe was a learner, and indeed owed much to earlier Chinese inventions and discoveries. Later on, of course, the story was different: once Europe had invented modern science, the current flowed back, though not without resistance. Here, too, the myth misleads by implying a kind of equal, undifferentiated contribution to the common treasure. The vast bulk of modern science was of Europe’s making, especially that breakthrough of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that goes by the name “scientific revolution.” Not only did non-Western science contribute just about nothing (though there was more there than Europeans knew), but at that point it was incapable of participating, so far had it fallen behind or taken the wrong turning. This was no common stream.
All of this has not discouraged the propagation of the new gospel, because in matters of this kind scholars are often the servants of their ideals and their needs. The extraneous ideological and political motivation here may be inferred from the following text:
Educated people all over the world are now prepared to respond to new revelations about Chinese scientific traditions…. The heightened interest has meant a small but perceptible rise in the world’s esteem for China. More to the point, it has meant that scientists all over the world are increasingly involved in the give and take that help Chinese scientists to be fully involved in the international scientific community.24
As though even now they needed encouragement.25
22
Japan: And the Last Shall Be First
Wealthy we do not at all think [Japan] will ever become: the advantages conferred by nature, with the exception of climate, and the love of indolence and pleasure of the people themselves, forbid it. The Japanese are a happy race, and being content with little, are not likely to achieve much.
—Japan Herald, 9 April 18811
Once in China, the Europeans would inevitably go on to the legendary Cipangu (Japan). (Actually, the first Europeans to arrive on Japanese soil, in 1543, were thrown up on shore by a storm.) They had heard wonderful things about these islands: “inexhaustible” gold in the greatest abundance, palace roofed and ceilinged with gold, tables of pure gold “of considerable thickness”…gold, gold, gold.* To say nothing of souls for saving.
The Japan they encountered was very different from the hearsay. Gold there was, but not enough to arouse passions. As in China, the people were ruled by an emperor, but more in principle than in fact, for the land was divided into smaller kingdoms or domains (what the Japanese called han), whose rulers seemed to enjoy absolute power over their subjects. These kingdoms were then engaged in intermittent wars with one another. Indeed, in that second half of the sixteenth century, Japan seemed awash in blood.
&nbs
p; This favorably impressed European visitors, whose own behavior gave them a well-founded respect for force and violence. As a Portuguese Jesuit put it, those who knew Japan “set it before all the countries of the East, and compared it with those of the West in its size, the number of its cities, and its warlike and cultured people.”2 This image persisted, even after the Japanese stopped fighting:
The national character is strikingly marked, and strongly contrasted with that which generally prevails throughout Asia. The Japanese differ most especially from the Chinese, their nearest neighbors…. Instead of that tame, quiet, orderly, servile disposition which makes [the Chinese] the prepared and ready subjects of despotism, the Japanese have a character marked by energy, independence and a lofty sense of honour.3
The Europeans were used to strange peoples; the Japanese, not:
The Japanese were first surprised to see the red-bearded, blue-eyed men, and then astonished by the natural power of their guns and powder. They were made to realize how great was the world…by the strange birds, curious beasts, precious silk, and beautiful damask brought from islands in the tropical zone and China. They wondered at the ideas and learning…the Japanese people, putting all this together, believed that there was a new heaven and earth far over the sea, and were thirsty to know this civilization. For this civilization was not like the quiet study of Confucianism, but a practical achievement before their eyes. Those who came from this new heaven and earth raised the price of merchandise, which had been almost a drug, to the great surprise of the Japanese, and demanded an unlimited supply, so that even a blade of grass or a tree had some value in the market…. The Japanese could not understand why this foreign trade was profitable to them. That they should become intimate with the Portuguese thus rich and thus strong, and learn their civilization, was the general idea of that time….4
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 41