#80 China's Long History
It is important to understand that China has a long-written history of economic and political development, and has been administering the huge landmass which makes up China today, for thousands of years.
Chinese politicians in the 21st century have been able to draw on the wisdom from ancient antiquity. Records of developments in China were written down. In the 13th century, Marco Polo, a traveller, a nobleman and trader from Venice, described a city of a million people. We know from a large cache of historical records, that traders had been moving and writing to each other for at least 1000 years. These written records were first discovered in the 20th century. They were found in a repository in a Jewish synagogue in Egypt in the early 20th century, having survived so well due to the dry air of the region.
We also know that traders speaking a variety of languages had been travelling very long distances to bring China's high-quality silks and porcelain across central Asia, through the Arab world. A British/Hungarian traveller, Aurel Stein in 1907, discovered another large cache of ancient documents in central Asia in a variety of languages and managed to have them shipped to the British Museum. These papers show the variety of peoples involved in diverse trades. Religions from India and central Asia were penetrating China, with the full agreement of the Chinese state. The Chinese authorities had welcomed religious diversity, in comparison to Europeans who fought each other to establish the ‘true religion’.
Chinese Technology Down the Ages
From the beginning of Western engagement with China, scholars have been intrigued with Chinese expertise in a wide range of skills.
The following areas have been studied in-depth and show that Chinese expertise was ahead of almost all peoples across the world:
Agriculture
Astronomy
Hydraulics
Metallurgy [i]
Medicine
Military Technologies
Civil and Structural Engineering
The Dunhuang star map of 700 AD. British Library Or.8210/S.3326 Ursa Major, Sagittarius and Capricornus are recognizable. The three colors (white, black and yellow) indicate the schools of astronomy of Shih Shen, Kan Te, and Wu Hsien.
They had papermaking sawmills, steel production, and they were experts in shipbuilding and navigation techniques. They even had early flying machines. While their silks and potteries were known across the world, they also had sophisticated skills in mathematics.
They had developed multispeed drills, used waterpower with a crank and connecting rod mechanism. They had invented the waterwheel and the water clock. Traditional Chinese medicine is still used all over the world. They had harnessed a huge variety of natural products to treat and cure illnesses of any sort.
China’s navy was the most prominent mode of defence against outside power, yet China’s seafaring techniques in the 14th century were hugely in advance of anything available in Europe. We have detailed accounts of China’s trips to the East African coast.
Much has been made of the Chinese – as well as the Japanese - decisions to close their countries to the rest of the world in the 17th century when European missionaries first appeared and began to attempt to Christianise local peoples. A direct consequence was that news of the rest of the world dried up. China stopped attempting to open trade with faraway places. China – unlike Japan, who had allowed the Dutch a toe hold on the Japanese coast and translated Dutch books into Japanese – had no warnings of the predatory industrialising westerners before they invaded China in 1842.
British troops capture Zhenjiang, 21st July 1842. Thomas Allom; G. N. Wright (1858). The Chinese Empire Illustrated. Retrieved from the British Library via Flickr.
Chinese technology had been light years ahead of anything that Western powers possessed, but the industrial revolution changed everything. The Chinese economy had not been growing year on year. By the 1840s, Chinese military technology could not compete with the Western powers. They were outgunned, and their ships were of a different era.
Why China did not have an Industrial Revolution
China had never undergone an Industrial Revolution. A few scholars have surmised why this was so. Most western scholars have assumed that industrialisation is the natural mode of development. As I have repeatedly said throughout these blogs, the word ‘Modernisation’, as well as often ‘industrialisation’, hides the assumption that Western capitalism is best and natural. These are difficult questions.
Western scholars even 70 years ago were amazed at Chinese technologies. Westerners assumed that all the societies they conquered were ‘backwards’, and their people were ignorant. Racial assumptions of Western superiority included China in their assumptions. So when Professor Joseph Needham spent the war years travelling all over China and then came home and wrote up his findings in 7 volumes, people were taken by surprise.
Recent 20th and 21st-century scholars have attempted to show that Chinese population counts, life expectations and so on provide comparative data with the rest of the world. Much of it is a guesstimate. The important issue for us is that China had a very long history before Western colonising nations exploded onto the scene in the 19th century threatening the ancient integrity of her diverse civilisation. Perhaps only the Romans had comparable technologies to China.
China was a rural society with a centralised kingdom. She invented or at least pioneered silk making, her tools for agriculture were relatively sophisticated. She had civil society exams that brought in the brightest sons, from across the nation, her naval ships were larger than anything we had at the time. She invented gunpowder, paper money and created immense border walls. Chinese forged its ideas of self, its thoughts and identity through a vast array of innovations, knowledge, and culture.
Chinese Ancient and Modern Civil Society
Over 2000 years ago, Emperors rid themselves of troublesome aristocrats and replaced them with the brightest talent from the poorest in society. This was the origin of the ‘Imperial Examination’. Those who passed became the ‘pupil of the emperor’. Interestingly the present-day CCP, with its communism with Chinese characteristics, is a parallel ladder of power. The top 5% of students are recruited into the CCP. It takes 2 or 3 years of training. The Party is the pipe of power of old China. The idea is to attract talent and motivation commitment from the mass of the people. The essence of Chinese policy is the massive participation of the people.
Chinese Ancient Religion and Ideology
China has a long tradition of Philosophers. which arose out of the Confucian tradition.
A priest pays his respect at the Tablet (Altar) of Confucius. J. F. Bishop circa 1900.
All ancient societies have powerful systems of thought which express their own very specific humanity. Down the ages, humans and religion have been an integrated whole. All human beings need to know where they have come from as well as where they go after death. They need to know their relations with the heavens, and with each other. And they need to know their relationship to the earth which provides them with the food they eat.
There is nothing special in all this, religious knowledge and human beings have been a single whole from eternity. China was of course no exception. China’s Confucian religion with its Taoist background provided old China with the meaning that religions provide.
China did not have a breakaway religion like Protestantism was to Christianity. They did not have to break asunder their old religion to make sense of the material world that the Westerners brought with them. Chinese Confucianism used dialectics as naturally as Marxists. Yin-Yang, heaven and earth, order and chaos, up and down. Confucianism had always been a mix of materialism and idealism. Dialectical materialism would later come naturally to Chinese scholars. The idea of quantity or quality, the negation of the negation, the unity of opposites, Hegel’s dialectic unity, and so on, these ideas made sense to the Chinese. So, socialism with Chinese characteristics was all part of the contradiction of present-day society, mixing irredeemably with the old. The move from Confucianism to Marxism seen in this light, such a big change after all.
Sun Tzu
One of the great philosophers of China’s long past was Sun Tzu; his thought is still as relevant as when it was written. Perhaps the most famous is Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Which he asserted was of vital use to the state. Here are a few of his statements that you can interpret for yourself:
If you know your enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of 100 battles.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting
All warfare is built on deception
The business of a general is to be quiet and ensure secrecy; upright and just and to maintain order. Be extremely subtle even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious even to the point of soundlessness
Form alliances with neighbouring states. The highest form of generalship is to baulk the enemy’s plans
You may advance and be absolutely irresistible if you make for the enemy’s weak points
To a surrounded enemy you must allow a way of escape.
What other country has a political philosophical heritage like this? Such thoughts can be adduced to many situations.
[i] While discussing Chinese expertise in many fields. We do not know if the Incas and other American civilisations had anything approaching the skills developed in China, especially in mechanical engineering, Astronomy, and Agriculture. We do know that these peoples had many great skills, but as they did not have written record, and they were defeated very fast in the at the end of the 15th and into the 16th century, we do not know how China and Inca skill may have compared.
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The peoples of Western Europe had risen from one world of relative poverty and had learnt how to take the wealth from the Americas and transfer it to their own countries. This was slavery and latterly until 1920, indentureship. A whole set up of banks, shipping companies, and insurance companies had arisen to make these transfers possible. From the 1750s the European invaders turned their attention to Asia and systematically began the colonisation process anew. At the same time, as they attempted to colonise and extract the wealth of Asia, the colonising countries began the process we now recognise as industrialisation alongside the rapid growth of cities. The surplus resources extracted through colonisation were used to finance the growth of new industries.