science, civilisation, economics and democracy in China

Something we don’t know know, here, is that in the first part of the last (20th) century people in the West were generally ignorant of the scores of technological advances made by China before about 1500. Now the  idea that ‘ It’s well known that the Chinese invented masses of things before they were known of in the West‘ is commonplace whether or not most people could name any; there is at least a general understanding that fireworks and spaghetti have their origins in China. Joseph Needham records an average of somethig like 15 major inventions per century from the time of Christ until 1500 years later*, including not just Bomb, Book and Compass (the title of a book by Simon Winchester, subtitled Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China), and the predecessors of the first two of these, gunpowder and paper, but also centreboards and multiple masts, segmental arched bridges, ephedrine, the decimal point, stirrups, the breast strap harnass, negative numbers, toilet paper; and there’s more: they discovered diabetes is associated with sweet and fatty foods (in the first century BC!).

Once the general outline of the creativity and power of Chinese technology is understood, two more questions arise. First why was this not a well known fact in the West prior to Needhams’s work (it wasn’t completely unknown as Winchester’s quote of Voltaire’s exaggeration suggests: ‘when we couldn’t even read the Chinese knew all the useful things we boast about today: The Philosophical Dictionary 1764)?

And then there’s  ‘the Needham question’. Id’ like to give you that as ‘why did the flood of technical advances in China slow to a trickle sometime around AD 1500?’ although others would make it “if the Chinese were so good at technology why didn’t they go on and invent modern science?’

The range of answers to this (these) question(s) is covered briefly at the end of Winchester’s book. There’s plenty more on the net eg this post at the Useless Tree summarises three and suggests a fourth.

Winchester prefers to start his epilogue with a few facts about Chongqing. Call me ignorant but I first heard of that city only last year watching Up the Yangtze a documentary about the flooding of the three Gorges dam. It’s also the Chinese city that had a brief notoriety in 2007 as the owners of the so called ‘nail house‘ resisted developers who dug many stories deep around the property they refused to sell. But I digress: Chongqing may well be the biggest and fastest growing city in the world, and yet I had never heard of it. Winchester points out that CQ has a population of 38 million; it increases by the population of Luxembourg each year and builds 150,000 square feet (14,000 square metres) of office accommodation each day.

Winchester wants to push ‘China’s case-hardened sense of inner certitude that this vast array of invetntion has given to it’ as a cause for both it’s relative decline in the 19th and early 20th century AND its late resurgence. In his view Needham himself never got close to and answer to his own question – erhaps he had too much detail and couldn’t see the forest. Winchester claims that the sum of other peole’s subsequent answers is that China stopped trying. They could have made a spinning wheel and a steam engine but they didn’t try. Which just moves the question on: Why did they stop trying? No mercantile class? No imperial rivals nearby? A too large homogenous, unifying but stultifying State?

He concludes by acknowledging those who think the question is misconceived or in any event no longer important; the new entrepreneurial spirit in China will, has already, spurred inventiveness again.

But has it? will it? W Jennings wrote the Tyranny of History in 1992: For Jennings the clash between economic progress and China’s history will lead to crisis not resurgence of technological capacity. He is thinking of history in all its aspects (state, politics, writing system, family and the ecological nightmare created by the success of pre-modern technology as much as recent economic growth). This appears to be similar to Will Hutton’s much more recent work  The Writing on the Wall (and see this Observer article) – but for me to draw this conclusion would be to judge that book only by its cover: I’ll come back to this subject when more qualified to speak, but a snippet fro teh Observer article suggests where he is going:

My hypothesis when I began was that China was so different that it could carry on adapting its model, living without democracy or European enlightenment values. I have changed my mind and now see more clearly than ever the kinds of connection I identified in The State We’re In between economic performance and so-called ’soft’ institutions – how people are educated, how trust relations are established and how accountability is exercised (just to name a few) – are central. They are equally important to a good society and the chance for individual empowerment and self-betterment.

The questions is, how to conceptualise this in a State subject to the tyranny of history to such as degree as China, at least on Jennings view?

*Needhams’ calculation reported by Winchester p 258.